While other students scribbled lecture notes or texted friends about party plans, Elliot Ramler and Jonathon Green sat in the back of a Monash University lecture hall taking calls from customers looking for deals on media players.<\/p>\n
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It was not long before their desire to bring reasonably priced media players to the Australian market bloomed into a burgeoning online retail enterprise.<\/p>\n
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Ramler and Green, like many before them, realised that the marketplace was not meeting their own consumer demands.<\/p>\n
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The solution? Go into business for themselves to satisfy that unmet demand.<\/p>\n
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\u201cWe initially launched as a niche online store focusing on digital media players, we saw a gap in the market as there was no company focusing on this product line,\u201d 25-year-old Ramler told StartupSmart.<\/p>\n
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\u201cWe both had media players but had to source them from overseas and because we loved the products so much we launched ELJO to service this growing market.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Since then, online retailer ELJO has expanded its product offerings to include a full range of electrical consumer goods, from entertainment to whitegoods.<\/p>\n
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Part of a generation that has grown up with online shopping as the norm, Ramler and Green wanted to take the hassle out of appliance shopping \u2014 no high pressure, in-store sales tactics, with name-brand products sourced at a good price with minimal overheads.<\/p>\n
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The early days of running the business gave the pair the sort of smarts rarely taught in university.<\/p>\n
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\u201cRunning a start-up requires being creative. We didn\u2019t have an office and we were both at university most days, but we had a website and wanted to look as if we were a \u2018big\u2019 company.<\/p>\n
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\u201cSo we got a 1300 number and diverted this to a pre-paid mobile phone which we carried around with us. Often we would find ourselves at the back of a lecture theatre answering the phone and taking orders, whilst customers just assumed they were calling an office.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Ramler says controlling your own destiny was one of the most appealing aspects of starting a business.<\/p>\n
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\u201cWhen you run your own business, you know that what you put in, you get out.<\/p>\n
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\u201cThe harder you work, the better results are achieved. This is not necessarily the case when you work for someone else.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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