izen Wolf co-founder Zoltan Csaki. Csaki launched his first pureplay e-commerce business as a side hustle to his full-time job in advertising back in 2006, and has been experimenting and learning about the online retail industry ever since. As the co-founder of carbon-positive made-to-order fashion brand Citizen Wolf, he is often asked to speak about his journey in the press and at conferences. He counts himself lucky to be able to inspire others to chase their dreams.  Here, we talk to Csaki about what it has been like to be a pioneer in the made-to-order fashion space, and what he’s learned about leadership from his workers. Inside Retail: What are some of the key lessons you’ve learned since launching Citizen Wolf five years ago? Zoltan Csaki: I think the most important thing I’ve learned is to focus. It’s really easy to get distracted, and it’s easy to think that the next thing, whatever it is, might be the silver bullet that solves all your problems, but in reality, it’s almost certainly not going to be like that. I’d also say [it’s important to be] relentlessly and ruthlessly focused on knowing who your customer is and being very, very clear about that, and who they are, and what they’re buying from you. I think that’s the number one thing. Over time, we’ve refined the model, but it’s really important to know whom you’re serving. IR: What has it been like taking the brand through this journey over the last five years? ZC: I think, hand on heart, my business partner [co-founder Eric Phu] and I really didn’t know what we were doing. We just had an idea that there was a huge problem in the fashion industry and we were naive enough, or potentially stupid enough, to come up with one potential solution. It’s funny. We started out thinking we were going to be fully e-commerce, but then ended up being exclusively physical retail for the first 18 months. We had to be able to measure people, so we set up a store in Sydney where we could do that to help generate the MagicFit algorithm – this was always the intention, but we ended up with more of a hybrid business model.  What we ended up figuring out, though, was that we were too small to do both channels really well. So we ended up doing what we initially set out to do – about 95 per cent of our business is online now, it just took us five long years to get there.  IR: How would you describe yourself as a leader? ZC: I’ve had some great advice in the past from somebody who has been very kind to me and the business. They said that being a good leader is effectively the same as being a good coach. I think what I struggle with, honestly, is that, because we’re such a small company and it started with just Eric and I, and we did basically everything, it’s hard to step back from that. Being a leader is a really different skill set to being on the tools, whatever those tools might be. And that’s a journey that I’m still on.  I’ve realised that half the battle is having really good systems in place to onboard and train people effectively. So much of the business just exists in my head, and I’m not great at documenting things, so I’ve been making the effort to systematise the business and understand the power in being able to say to someone, ‘This is what needs to be done, this is how we’ve done it, if you can figure out a better way, I’m all ears.’