“In the early stages, I believed growth meant launching more styles. Until I looked at my data and realised that 80% of revenue consistently came from 20% of my products. My best-sellers were always running out of stock. If I could go back, I would double down on fewer styles sooner.”
Lili Thomas spent years wearing heels that hurt. Not occasionally, not after a long night, but every single day. She wore them to her corporate marketing job in Adelaide, to dinners, to parties, and she kept wearing them even when her feet were screaming at her to stop. She loved how they made her feel. She just wished they did not cost her so much pain to get there.
The moment that finally pushed her over the edge came at a party. She had on a pair from one of Australia’s most recognised footwear brands. They were beautiful. They were also unwearable. “I thought, why is such a big brand that specialises in heels still making them so uncomfortable?” she said. It was a question that stayed with her.
She looked at what the market was offering. There were a few brands with comfortable heels, but they were flat, or low, or just not the style she wanted. Nobody was solving the actual problem: a heel that looked the part and felt good enough to wear all day. So the following week, she went to the shops, bought a sketchpad and some colouring pencils, laid out her favourite walking sneakers next to her existing heels, and started drawing. “It all started with my own needs and that one sketch,” she said.
She had no background in footwear design, and she is the first to say so. “I’m not a shoe designer, but I am a customer,” she said. “I sat down with some pairs of heels and sneakers and looked at how I could create a shoe that was stunning but able to be worn comfortably all day.”
That sketch became Luminous Assembly. She launched in 2020 with two styles, from her garage in Adelaide, built around what she calls comfort-first design: Lumisoft memory foam insoles, buttery-soft leather, adjustable straps, a stable heel, and on some styles, a hidden platform that offsets heel height without losing the look.
Building trust from scratch
Getting anyone to notice a brand they have never heard of is hard. Getting them to trust it enough to spend money on it is harder. Lili understood this from day one, drawing on her marketing background to think carefully about how she built awareness. “As a marketer by trade, I was taught that a customer needs to see your brand at least seven times before they even consider buying from you,” she said. So she showed up everywhere she could: social media, word of mouth, and customer reviews became the pillars of everything she did in those early months.
Behind the scenes, she was doing the unglamorous work that most people do not see. After finishing her corporate job each day, she would sit down at 11pm and email customers one by one, personally asking for reviews. She packed and posted every pair herself. She was running a business in the hours most people use to wind down, and she did it for years before the revenue justified leaving her day job.
Cash flow was its own battle. Footwear is a capital-heavy category. “You have to pay for all your stock upfront before you even start making sales,” she said. “You also need a big space to store the shoes as they are quite bulky.” She managed it by bootstrapping from the start and only bringing in outside help when the business was genuinely ready for it. She moved from her garage to a self-storage unit, and eventually into a third-party logistics provider that now handles same-day dispatch for orders placed before 2pm. Each step came in its own time.
“I have always thought that business is like running a marathon not a sprint,” she said. “I have learned to take a slow but steady approach to growth.” Two years ago, that slow and steady approach paid off enough for her to leave her corporate job and run Luminous Assembly full time. The brand now carries 18 styles and has crossed $750,000 in annual revenue.
The lesson that changed everything
If you ask Lili what she would do differently, she does not need long to think about it. For a long time, she believed that growth meant launching more styles. More options, more customers, more sales. It made sense in theory. Then she looked at the data. “I realised that 80% of revenue consistently came from 20% of my products,” she said. “My best-sellers were always running out of stock. If I could go back, I would double down on fewer styles sooner.” It was a harder pill to swallow than it sounds.
As a creative and a visionary, pulling back on new launches goes against the instinct to keep moving, keep building, keep launching the next thing. But the numbers were clear.
She now takes new styles to market through pre-orders, testing demand before committing to full production runs. The result has been tighter inventory, better conversion rates, more focused marketing, and a stronger overall efficiency ratio. “In e-commerce, founders must understand numbers like conversion rate, returning customer rate, average order value, traffic volume, marketing spend ratio, gross margin, operational costs and net profit,” she said.
“This is something I have been very cognisant of since the beginning.” The discipline has extended to the personal side of running a business too. She talks honestly about learning to stop comparing herself to other founders, to tune out the noise of social media and stay focused on what is actually happening inside her own business.
“The more I stayed focused on my goals and in my business, the more year-on-year growth I can see,” she said. When things feel slow or uncertain, she comes back to a quote she keeps close: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. It’s about having the courage to take that first step, then keep going one step at a time.”
What’s next
“I’ve been playing it safe but now I am ready to grow exponentially. It was a slow burn but I am so proud of where we are and how we’ve grown, all while bootstrapping the company.”
Luminous Assembly is direct-to-consumer across Australia today, but Lili is now moving into wholesale and working toward securing stockists both locally and internationally. She is clear about what the brand stands for, and why she believes it fills a gap that bigger players have consistently missed. “What differentiates Luminous Assembly is every shoe is designed by a woman who loves and actually wears heels, for women,” she said. “You find a lot of bigger fashion footwear brands were created either by men or a team of designers that wanted to create great looking heels but have no idea what it is to wear heels all day.”
The customer feedback, she says, proves the concept better than any marketing campaign could. “I have beautiful reviews from customers who have said they used to love wearing heels but got tired of them, until they found my brand. And now they love wearing Luminous Assembly.”
Five years in, bootstrapped from a garage in Adelaide, she is proud of what the business has become and honest about what comes next. “I’ve been playing it safe but now I am ready to grow exponentially,” she said. “It was a slow burn but I am so proud of where we are and how we’ve grown, all while bootstrapping the company.” The end goal is global recognition. And if Margot Robbie happens to be wearing a pair somewhere along the way, Lili would not complain at all.
Discover Luminous Assembly at luminousassembly.com.au
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