2013’s Hot 30 Under 30: 16-20

Lorraine Murphy Company: The Remarkables Group Age: 30

The Remarkables Group is a first of its kind – a talent agency for bloggers. The first agency of this sort in Australia, the aim of the business is to create partnerships between influential bloggers and brands. Prior to launching The Remarkables Group, Lorraine Murphy had worked for eight years in PR before realising the potential for brands through working with bloggers in November 2010.

Having launched just over a year ago, The Remarkables Group already has 15 bloggers including Laura McWhinnie from thislandandlife.com and Andrea Zanetich from foxinflats.com.au. The Remarkables Group joins brands and bloggers together to help brands find a suitable ambassador, establish product integration on blogs, write sponsored posts, speaking engagements, talent for campaigns, guest posting and event hosting.

In just six months, the business has grown from one to six staff members and now has a list of clients including Woolworths, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Telstra and Gumtree.

Murphy told BRW she is on track to make $1 million this financial year.

Jane Lu Company: Show Pony Age: 27

Show Pony, an online fashion store, was established two-and-a-half years ago, but in the past year it has emerged as a “go-to” store for young females. When starting out, Lu launched the business with a partner, but a year in they had discovered too many differences in their visions and Lu bought out her partner.

In the next year, Lu turned Show Pony around and it is now leading the way in terms of Australian online fashion retail. Offering more than just a store, Show Pony has a “community” portal with lookbooks, YouTube videos, bloggers, recipes, information about photos from events, images from fashion shoots and a collection of media articles featuring the store.

As well as these features, it links to the brand’s Instagram account and allows consumers to shop by trend. Through its Facebook page the store now reaches over 150,000 people and it’s now starting selling to international markets including the United States. As its international market grows, Lu intends to develop other country specific pages, source directly from China and expand into other ranges, including sportswear.

Show Pony made about $1 million in annual revenue last financial year.

Hugh Stephens Company: Dialogue Consulting Age: 23

Hugh Stephens co-founded Dialogue Consulting in September 2011 and provides social media strategy, training, content, analysis and risk management solutions to Australian and New Zealand businesses and not-for-profit organisations.

Stephens is constantly emerged in social media and provides commentary to news outlets such as ABC News 24, Leader Newspapers, 2GB and the Medical Journal of Australia. He has a background in statistics and decision-making and was recently on a team which placed eighth in the EMC Science Global Data Hackathon, run by Kaggle.

Dialogue Consulting intends to expand its operations in New Zealand, but Stephens intends for the agency to remain niche. On top of consulting with businesses, Dialogue Consulting runs public training workshops to provide low-cost advice to small businesses and not-for-profits and Stephens has been working on developing tools which allow businesses and sports teams to quantitatively measure their social media presence.

John Winning Company: Appliances Online, Winning Appliances, Big Brown Box Age: 28

John Winning always had big shoes to fill. For four generations, his family has run Winning Appliances, a brick-and-mortar chain of appliance dealers that last year turned over $150 million.

But that wasn’t enough for Winning, who in 2005 established Appliances Online, the digital extension of his family’s legacy. Armed with a $50,000 loan and three months to see how it works, and forbidden from using the family name in case the business flunked, in just eight short years Winning has grown Appliances Online to a business turning over at least $20 million every year.

He’s since also started Big Brown Box, another online retailer focusing on audio-visual products. He now runs the larger Winning Appliances in addition to the businesses he founded

Ash Davies Company: Tablo Publishing Age: 20

At just 20, Ash Davies is already an accomplished entrepreneur.

He’s the founder of online magazine PhotoGuides, which boasts 40,000 subscribers. He’s also published a book with the same title. And in 2012, he founded Tablo Publishing, a self-publishing platform that makes it simple for authors to publish books with a single click.

This entrepreneurial spark led to his being crowned Best Young Entrepreneur by our sister site at the StartupSmart awards earlier this year.

At the time, Chanel Costabir, founder of The Lingerie Boutique and judge of the young entrepreneur award, said it was “highly commendable that he has not only identified a need but [has] taken action at such a young age.”

“To put it simply, he is removing the pain from having a digital book published. Definitely the work of an entrepreneur!”