Coffee Joulies<\/a> \u2013 they were named number one performer in the \u201cOther\u201d category of the competition.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s worth noting this category was the biggest one in the competition, totaling 34% of sales. The other categories were apparel and jewellery, food and health, sports and hobbies, art and photography, and home and office.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Other Australian category winners included FlockStocks, which supplies hair extensions and is based in Byron Bay, and Cairns-based business My Footy Boots, which sells football boots.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Based in Melbourne, Ward and Peters are the brains behind the Opena Case \u2013 an iPhone case that doubles as a bottle opener \u2013 and also designed an iPhone mount known as Quad Lock.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ward and Peters used crowdfunding website Kickstarter to finance the Opena Case, before choosing the Shopify platform to sell their products.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe chose the platform because it\u2019s customisable, scaleable, can process order from all over the world and it\u2019s easy to plug in third-party logistics,\u201d Ward says.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
With sales for the Opena Case exceeding 10,000 units across 67 countries within a few months of trading, the entrepreneurs pushed hard in the last few months of the competition.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The win has landed them an impressive prize pack including $25,000 in cash, a VIP trip to New York for lunch with marketing guru Seth Godin, and $7,500 Google Adwords credit.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ward and Peters operate under the name Annex Products, and recently signed a worldwide distribution partnership with multinational mobile tech firm Forward Industries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Australian iPhone entrepreneurs Rob Ward and Chris Peters are among the winners of Shopify\u2019s Build-A-Business competition, receiving $25,000 in cash<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33964"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33964\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}