Hi, I'm Rachel 👋

The Wine Society

At Melbourne Uni I ran marketing and events for the Wine Society. The "team" was me, a Mailchimp account, my own money in Meta ads, and a habit of personally messaging every new member so they felt welcome. Not scalable, but it worked. People came back. People brought friends. When Wine Camp tickets opened, there was already a crowd waiting at the oval. Sold out in minutes, and we had to turn people away, which I hated more than I expected to.

Growth & startups

Next came The Talent Institute's growth traineeship: how to grow a company from scratch with lean (or no) resources, and how to think across every part of marketing. We built mock companies from landing page to investor pitch. (Years of singing and volunteer door-knocking meant talking to strangers came easy.)

Then a placement at Startupbootcamp, the parent company. First, lead acquisition for Energy Australia's accelerator: LinkedIn and Meta ads, plus a steady run of experiments to lift application rates (including a shorter Typeform, after I argued for it). Then supporting Asahi's Corporate Innovation team to validate new beverage concepts before anyone built them: the landing pages, the designer briefs, the Meta ads. One concept pulled 200+ expressions of interest in a week.

In between, I'd sit in on the accelerator's founder sessions whenever I could, just to hear how good operators think.

Agency years

Agency-side next: a stint at Stage3, then four formative years at Harvey. Small agency, all the hats, until I gravitated toward eCommerce and Klaviyo, the parts of the job that lit me up most. Most of my time went to ATEC's international expansion (Cambodia, Bangladesh) and Jasper Coffee's eCommerce-meets-retail puzzle, with Kester Black, Peninsula Hot Springs, Bank Australia and Merry People along the way. That's where I worked out what kind of marketer I am.

Brand-side, and what's next

By the end of Harvey I knew I wanted end-to-end ownership of a brand's marketing, not just slices of it. I'd first met Amble Outdoors years earlier at a Melbourne demo day, freelanced with them briefly, then came back as their Marketing Manager.

As the only marketer in the company, I turned email from a side channel into a core revenue driver, and led the Adventure Grant campaign while the founder was on leave. 12× more applications than the year before, over 1,600 in total. Alongside the day job I've kept consulting for startups and small brands; it keeps me close to founders and the day-one problems I love.