How Jevon Le Roux did it: He Ran One of Australia's Biggest Athleisure Brands - Then Built Software to Fix Its Biggest Flaw
Jevon Le Roux dropped out of high school to become a professional surfer, competing on the world tour for five years and spending nine months of the year traveling. Competitive surfing taught him "the art of marketing because I had to market myself" — and the art of "living on a thread." When he wanted to build something more, he became a sales agent for his sponsor Billabong, then built the Nike surfwear brand Hurley in South Africa from the ground up with his own working capital.
The idea behind Keeyu came from pain he watched firsthand. At the start of Covid in 2020, everything shifted online and a brand he was at ran a big online warehouse sale. The storefront stopped syncing orders with the warehouse, so customers kept buying things that were sold out and oversold. When the dust settled two or three days later, there were 1,000 customers who had given the brand money but weren't going to get what they ordered. His co-founder Tracy had to double her team, get on the phone, apologise, and process refunds. As Jevon recounts it, Tracy said that if she could have spotted the issue in real time, "I could have stopped the problem from snowballing." That line sits at the heart of Keeyu.
Keeyu is "an AI powered platform for proactive post purchase ecom ops." The first version was a centralized platform that pulled together every system that manages an order — storefront, payment gateway, ERP, WMS, carrier integrations, returns modules, help desk — to detect issues. But it "turned out that that was a vitamin for retailers, it wasn't a painkiller," because you could detect the issue but still had to fix it manually. The penny dropped after a customer said they liked not knowing they had problems because the issues "sorted themselves out" — which meant frustrated customers the brand never heard about. So the team asked: can we automate fixing this?
Before they committed, Jevon took his partner and son out for lunch at a nice restaurant and warned them it was going to be chaotic again — living on the edge of being technically insolvent, the way it had been years before — and asked if everyone was up for it. He got a "let's do it." To land the first customers with only a raw MVP, he went in at the user level inside organisations, ran surveys to surface frustration, then came back up to management with what he'd heard and asked them to be a first pilot customer even though Keeyu didn't have a product yet. That got three pilot customers, including Helly Hanson.
What you'll hear
- From pro surfer to brand builder — five years on the world tour, then building the Nike surfwear brand Hurley in South Africa from nothing
- The 2020 warehouse-sale disaster — how 1,000 oversold orders during Covid became the origin story for Keeyu
- Vitamin, not painkiller — why the first version of Keeyu detected problems but didn't solve the crux of them
- Selling before there's a product — going in at the user level, then asking management to be a pilot customer with no product yet
- The Shopify-app detour — building a light, product-led version that "didn't work" and deepened their conviction to be sales-led
- Building a category, not a feature — educating retailers used to reactive, firefighting customer service
- The founder roller coaster — five signed customers in three weeks after weeks of doubt, and a customer who'd quit her job for the product
Key claims from this episode
Chapters
Quotes from this episode
there is that bit of angst that what they've ordered is not gonna arrive on time as promised — Jevon Le Roux, on the problem Keeyu solves (01:50) it turned out that that was a vitamin for retailers, it wasn't a painkiller — Jevon Le Roux, on the first version of Keeyu (11:08) we kinda don't have a product today, but would you be our first pilot customer — Jevon Le Roux, on landing the first pilots (10:31) you gotta get really comfortable with being rejected, you gotta get really comfortable being told it can't be done — Jevon Le Roux, on the most valuable lesson (21:50) she said I just wouldn't come to work tomorrow — Jevon Le Roux, recounting a customer's answer in a case study (25:50)
Themes Jevon returns to
- Proactive, not reactive — fixing the ops issue before the customer asks "where is my order"
- Vitamin vs. painkiller — solving the crux of the problem, not just detecting it
- Release imperfect, iterate in real life — never afraid to release an imperfect product, no "gaudy cathedral in its entirety"
- Building the category — educating retailers who've done customer service reactively for decades
- Conviction through rejection — getting comfortable with being told no and with naysayers
- Celebrate the small wins — riding the roller coaster of emotions of getting it right and not