The million-dollar secret ShowPo CEO Jane Lu kept from her family for years

They say to just 'fake it 'til you make it'. Well, Jane Lu, CEO and Founder of Showpo, is living proof it works.

Jane didn't fake her way through the world of finance, but pretended to go to a job (which no longer existed) and hid this from her parents for two whole years in the early days of her start-up idea.

She was literally getting dressed every morning for her non-existent corporate job in the city.

Watch the video above.

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"I was in my black pinstriped suit and catching the bus with my mum, as she worked in the city too," Lu tells the So, I Quit My Day Job podcast.

"She would go to her job, and I would go find a café to sit in for the day.

"After a while I couldn't afford the coffees, and so I went to the State Library, which is where I spent a lot of time studying for the HSC."

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All the while Jane was working away on Showpo, an online fashion retail platform that started off in her parents' garage, but it took time to fess up to her parents about her pretend day job.

"Two orders a day, I'm never going to be able to tell my parents. But by the next month I started running Google ads and I increased the Facebook ads budget, more social posts, better customer service," she recalls.

"Next month we made 9k, next 40k, next 140k. It went from two orders a day to a million-dollar run rate."

Fast-forward to 2023, and Showpo now rakes in eye-watering $100 million annually and has a team of over 110 employees, boasts over 3.5 million followers across social media and is shipped to more than 120 countries… and Jane's parents are across her movie-worthy 'day job' pretence!

Labelling herself as 'The Lazy CEO', Jane is anything but, and the story of how she built her own fashion label shows no matter how many speed bumps and setbacks are in your way, there's always another way around.

Listen to more episodes of So, I Quit My Day Job here