Ruslan Kogan

I feel for the David Jones team and hope they get to keep their jobs. Canberra’s overspending helps push up inflation and rates. More on the mortgage, less to spend at DJs. If any of them do lose their jobs, there’s one saving grace. There's never been a better and easier time to go and work for the government. Half the work, triple the pay.

There’s a game-changing trend in retail right now, and it’s already hitting the bottom lines of the world’s biggest companies. Recently, Google and Amazon both saw search and ad revenues miss market expectations, while Meta is seeing incredible results and millions of downloads for its AI shopping assistant, Muse. This isn't a blip..it's a massive shift in how people shop. For 20 years, we've seen the concept of "brandless quality" and private labels boom. From Zara and Uniqlo in fast fashion to Costco's Kirkland and our own exclusive brands at Kogan, consumers are increasingly shopping based on features, specifications, and value rather than just a logo. Now, AI is supercharging this. AI agents are helping customers become purely rational shoppers. They're helping make purchasing decisions based on hard specs and actual needs, completely stripping away the emotional pull of traditional marketing. If your brand relies solely on positioning, and near identical products can be found elsewhere for a better deal, you are going to get found out in the AI era. True innovators with clear differentiators, like Apple and Dyson, will remain valuable, but the landscape for everyone else is changing fast. Here is where the industry is splitting: platforms like Amazon are closing up, building walls, and trying to ban AI agents from crawling their sites. At Kogan, we are doing the exact opposite. We are opening our site up and making it easier for AI agents to crawl our products, compare our features, and help users make rational decisions. For two decades, we've loved smart, rational customers who do their research, open multiple tabs, and find the best deal. Because the more people do that, the more customers we win. AI bots are essentially spinning up new instances of computers and acting as humans. In the long term, they will be nearly impossible to block. Over the next year, this will be the biggest talking point in retail. How much of your sales are driven by AI agents? And what does it mean for your brand when you have to sell to a hyper-rational computer instead of an emotional human? There is a lot to unpack here, and it is completely transforming the game. Drop a comment below..I'd love to hear your thoughts on where this is heading.

Kogan “doesn’t pay tax”? Then here’s a basic research question: how has it paid fully franked dividends? That should prompt a sanity check before posting. If you’re paid by taxpayers, surely checking your facts is part of the job?

The ATO has no local competitor. Australia has plenty. The decision to stop accepting credit card payments raises a bigger question about how we treat the people building businesses in this country. You can’t switch tax offices because you’re unhappy with the service. But entrepreneurs can choose where they build their next business, invest their capital and create jobs. I’m hearing more of those conversations in the business community, and it worries me. A credit card policy alone won’t send someone overseas. But these decisions add up. They send a message about whether we value the people taking risks and employing Australians. We should be giving them more reasons to build here.

Building a billion-dollar business means making mistakes and learning from them. If you bought a Kogan product 15 years ago, the quality wasn't what it is today - and I completely own that. As we've scaled, so has our access to the most advanced factories in the world. Here’s an honest look at the reality of global supply chains and how our quality has evolved.

Legacy retailers are quick to blame the economy when sales slow down, but that misses the entire point. Aussies haven't stopped shopping - they’ve just stopped overpaying. We just announced strong, double-digit year-on-year growth at Kogan proving that consumers are doing their research, comparing specs, and demanding more value than ever before. If your business isn't delivering value in this environment, smart shoppers will simply go to the ones that do. Let's call a spade a spade.

Wanking From Home? The hard truth about the WFH debate: it’s hurting the people who think they want it the most. Young grads are missing out on crucial moments of learning, networking, and organic growth that you just can't get from clicking into a video call. Let's be honest: the people making the biggest fuss about WFH are usually the ones you least want on your team. Top performers just want to get the job done, with a bit of flexibility along the way. Are we doing young professionals a massive disservice? #WFH #WorkFromHome #CareerAdvice #BusinessTruths #OfficeLife #CorporateCulture

I want you to be completely selfish when you shop at @Kogan Please, do not buy from us out of pity, benevolence, or simply because we are an Australian founded business. My last video about expecting our team to negotiate the best deal on 100 pizzas sparked some outrage. A few people accused us of "corporate greed" and failing to support the local community. But here is the reality: Have you ever seen those signs at the park that say, “Please don’t feed the ducks”? 🦆 You might think you are doing them a favour, but you are actually killing them. The exact same principle applies to business. Paying full retail price out of "pity" doesn't help a local business.. it makes them complacent. Demanding a better deal forces them to engineer their operations, find economies of scale, and actually compete. It forces a win-win. I break down exactly how an enterprising pizza shop owner would handle that 100-pizza order in this video. At @Kogan , we want you to look at every offer in the market, compare the features and prices, and choose us purely because we are the best deal for you. Please be selfish! What do you think? When you pay full price out of pity to "support local", are you actually helping them grow, or are you just feeding the ducks? 👇 #BusinessStrategy #Leadership #Kogan #Competition #Entrepreneurship #FreeMarket

Company culture isn’t written in a document. It can be found in small invoices. After I posted a video washing my t-shirts in a hotel bathtub, a lot of people told me: “Hotels aren’t targeting you. They’re targeting the corporate credit card, and your own team is probably expensing it." That comment gets to the absolute heart of culture. At @Kogan , we don’t need a 50-page corporate travel policy. Our policy is much simpler: Spend the company’s money the exact same way you would spend your own. Because every dollar we spend ultimately belongs to our customers and shareholders. This reminds me of a meetup we hosted years ago. A team member needed to order 100 pizzas for our guests. They simply called a shop and ordered 100 pizzas at the normal, full retail menu price. 🍕 That’s not how we think. If you’re ordering 100 pizzas, you don’t pay 100x the price of one pizza. You call the best-reviewed local shops and ask: “I want to order 100 pizzas. What’s the best deal you can do?” Then you compare quality, price, and service, and make a commercially minded decision. That’s not being cheap. That’s forcing efficiency and creating a win-win. Small invoices reveal big cultural truths. Laundry bills. Pizza orders. Flights. Hotels. Software subscriptions. The small stuff is never just small stuff. What do you think? Do companies need strict, detailed expense policies, or should a strong culture make the right decisions obvious? 👇

I never thought I'd be posting a video from a hotel bathroom 🤯 I refuse to pay $20 to wash a $10 t-shirt. It doesn't matter what kind of hotel I'm staying at. Instead, the bath tub becomes a makeshift laundromat. My family came to Australia in 1989 with $90. Growing up, I watched my parents meticulously stretch every single dollar. That approach to frugality didn't just shape me personally, it became the DNA of @Kogan We view it as our duty to our customers and shareholders to respect every dollar we're entrusted with. That means always comparing pink lady apples with pink lady apples and making value choices. Naturally, this drives our core strategy: push prices down to drive volume up. Lower prices actually make us more profitable. Which brings me back to hotel laundry. I can't help but think hotels are shooting themselves in the foot by ignoring basic price elasticity. By inflating the price of a basic necessity, they completely kill their volume. If they just charged a reasonable amount for laundry services, they'd capture the massive hidden demand. What do you think? If hotels halved the price of laundry, would demand 10x?

"Go f*ck yourself" is what recruiters will probably say after watching this... I deserve it. ​Never outsource your core competencies. There is nothing more important than the people you hire to obsess over your customers, which is why I still review the hiring for every single head office role.

What sort of Australia are we building? What are we trying to incentivise? What do we want our country to look like in 10, 20, 30 years time?

Today @Kogan turns 20. Two decades ago, online retail in Australia barely existed. When we launched Koganin 2006, many people said nobody would ever buy a TV online without touching it first. We believed otherwise. Over the last 20 years we've generated more than $10 billion in sales, saved Australians over $1 billion, and built one of the largest online retailers in the country. These days, by 1am on any given day we do more sales than we did in our entire first year. Reflecting on the journey, what stands out most isn’t the successes - it’s the challenges we survived. Some of them were genuinely near-death experiences, especially in the early years. In terms of the achievements, we’re a publicly listed company and the numbers speak for themselves (see the chart). But the stories behind those numbers are far more interesting. Here are a few moments from the journey. ___ 2006 - Our main sales channel disappeared overnight In the early days, eBay was our main sales channel. Then one day eBay shut down our account and PayPal froze all the funds in our account - we were growing too quickly with too many presales for their comfort. For a young startup, losing your main sales channel and having all your cash frozen at the same time could easily have been the end. We survived by taking out credit cards and leaning on friends to do the same. It taught us a valuable lesson very early: always control your own destiny. That experience accelerated our focus on building our own direct channel. Today both eBay and PayPal regularly talk to us about how we can extend our partnerships even further. ___ 2008 - A TV crisis before the Beijing Olympics We had grown rapidly in our first two years and the Beijing Olympic Games were approaching. Major sporting events drive huge demand for TVs, so we presold containers of TVs leading into the Olympics. The shipments were on their way when we discovered a manufacturing fault that would cause the sound to stop working within the first few months. We couldn’t have customers experiencing failures during the Olympics. So we proactively arranged for engineers to visit every customer around the country and replace the sound board before it failed. It cost a lot of money. In fact, it effectively wiped out all the profit from our first two years of business. But protecting customers mattered more. We outgrew that factory long ago, and today we partner with some of the largest and most sophisticated TV manufacturers in the world to produce some of the best-value TVs anywhere. ___ 2013 - The rise and fall and rise-again of Kogan Mobile In 2013 we launched Kogan Mobile on the Telstra network through Telstra’s sole distributor of 3G mobile services at the time. It became Australia’s fastest-growing telco almost overnight. Then the distributor went into administration. We had to shut down the business and refund more than 100,000 customers. It was a very tough period with a lot of adverse publicity. But we knew we were onto something because of how quickly customers embraced the product. We relaunched Kogan Mobile in 2016 and today it has been delivering some of the best mobile deals in Australia for over a decade and has grown to become one of the country’s largest telcos. ___ 2015 - When the banks didn’t understand eCommerce As the business grew, we looked for additional working capital to accelerate growth. At the time, online retail was still poorly understood by many banks in Australia. We eventually secured a small facility from a well known bank, but it was only a fraction of the value of our inventory and came with very strict covenants. There was a period where heavy investment in growth brought us dangerously close to breaching those covenants. That experience contributed to our decision to raise some equity from investors and list on the ASX. These days we have a far larger facility from a Big Four bank that is usually undrawn - and they’re often encouraging us to expand it. ___ 2016 - The IPO that nearly didn’t happen We had spent more than a year preparing for our IPO - investing huge amounts of time and resources - when the process almost collapsed at the last minute. One of the Investment Banks acting as Joint Lead Manager suddenly walked away. They had decided to pursue what they believed would be a more lucrative opportunity advising on a potential listing of The Good Guys. Around the same time, the prospective Chairman they had arranged also withdrew. The official explanation we were given was that “there isn’t enough demand to proceed.” That didn’t quite add up. So we called a few of the investors we had met during the roadshow and received feedback that contradicted what we had been told. Thankfully, the other Joint Lead Manager - one we had worked with for many years and who truly understood our business - stayed committed to the process. They believed in what we were building and backed us all the way through. They’ve remained an important partner ever since. It reinforced something I’ve learned many times over the years: In life, you can’t make new old friends. The same is true in business. ___ 2021 - The inventory tsunami When COVID hit, we felt a responsibility to be there for our customers when they needed us most. Demand exploded and our business more than doubled in a short period of time as we delivered essential items to Australians in lockdown. Despite the growth, we were still unable to service all the customer needs due to stock shortages. So we made the decision to invest heavily in inventory. At the time the prevailing view was that lockdowns could last for five years. Then vaccines arrived, restrictions lifted, and consumer spending started to shift back to experiences like travel and hospitality. Meanwhile the inventory we had already ordered kept arriving. At one point we literally couldn’t fit the stock into our 14 distribution facilities around the country. We started paying significant demurrage fees - something I hadn’t encountered in the first 15 years of the business - which is what you pay when containers sit at port waiting to be unloaded. At one stage the word around the shipping industry was that we had paid more demurrage than any importer in Australian history. It was an extremely difficult period. But it forced us to rethink the business. We accelerated our focus on platform-based sales, marketplace partnerships and subscription revenue. Today the majority of our business is platform driven and far more capital-light and resilient. ___ 2025 - Competition makes us better I love competition. It’s what makes me jump out of bed in the morning. For the past 20 years we’ve had the privilege of competing with some incredibly smart operators in Australian eCommerce - companies like Catch, DealsDirect, TopBuy, Matt Blatt, Groupon, OHKI, Tyagi, Eljo, Amazon, eBay and many others. Some of those competitors no longer exist, which is a little sad. Competition makes the game more interesting. But we always paid close attention to the ideas they brought to the market. When a competitor did something clever, we studied it and learned from it. For example, for a long time we believed there was no point launching a marketplace because eBay already dominated the category. Then Catch launched one and it grew rapidly. We realised we were wrong - and moved quickly to launch our own marketplace. Competition has a funny way of forcing you to rethink your assumptions. And that’s a good thing. Fierce competition makes businesses better - and it’s one of the most exciting parts of running a company. ___ These experiences reinforce an old saying: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” In a business like ours we make thousands of decisions every day. Some of them inevitably turn out to be wrong. The key is making sure we learn from those mistakes and embed those lessons into the organisation. Working through these challenges with my business partner David Shafer and the best minds in Australian eCommerce has been an honour, a privilege, and the highlight of my career. I’m incredibly grateful to our team and to the millions of customers who have trusted us with their hard-earned money over the past two decades. And while we’re proud of what we’ve achieved, I’m equally proud of something else: By relentlessly driving value for customers, we’ve helped keep the bastards honest across Australian retail. ___ Three decades, three different games Our first decade was all about being early to the internet. When we launched in 2006, the major retailers in Australia were saying online retail would never really take off. While they were debating whether the internet mattered, we were busy building on it. That gave us an opportunity to gain huge market share while others were asleep at the wheel. Eventually everyone realised the internet was real and here to stay. So our second decade became all about operational efficiency and refining the business model. We launched new subscription revenue verticals, built out our marketplace, and introduced Kogan FIRST, which has grown into one of the largest retail subscription programs in the country. The focus shifted from simply being online to being the best at running an online retail platform. Now we’re entering our third decade and the defining force will be AI. In many ways it feels like the early internet all over again. The opportunities to improve efficiency and deliver unprecedented value to customers are enormous. It feels like things are about to get easier than they were in the early days. Our team is so excited about what’s coming that it feels like being a kid in a candy store again. We already have a few things in the works. Watch this space. 20 years down. We’re just getting started.

Incredible and inspirational Aussie startup story

So proud of the results our team announced at the $KGN AGM today. Kogan.com reported 29.1% year on year sales growth for the first 4 months of this financial year. That huge growth is winning significant marketshare against some of Australia's and the globes biggest retailers. And we're managing that investment in growth while also growing profitability. We do have a few things we need to realign at our @MightyApe business in NZ and we know the playbook well. It will be "bread and butter" for Oceania's best eCommerce minds to execute our winning strategy. The Kogan Group is excited as we enter the busiest time of year and we get ready to serve millions of savvy shoppers! 🎅