Catch of the Decade

CHAPTER 17Wesfarmers come calling

Wesfarmers is one of Australia's largest listed companies. It started as a farmers' cooperative back in 1914 and now is a diversified conglomerate worth over $50 billion, with retail operations that include blue‐chip operations such as Bunnings, Kmart, Target and Officeworks. You could say they know retail.

So, imagine our surprise when we strolled into work one morning to find an email from the heads of Wesfarmers sitting in our inbox. The subject line? ‘Catch up?’ There were other lines in that email that caught our eye. ‘Comparing notes on ways we can work together’ and ‘A marketplace offer is an obvious hole in our strategy’.

Our first reaction?

Holy shit! Is this what we think it is? Is Wesfarmers, this monolith of Australia's greatest brands, courting us? It is and they were. Could our Fair-Etail get any better?

Here's what happened.

Gabby

The meeting with Wesfarmers took place at the offices of Intrinsic, our financial advisers, in Cremorne, an inner‐city suburb of Melbourne. We had no idea what to expect. We took our seats at the boardroom table, and watched as the top brass from Wesfarmers filed in. After the initial introductions were over, their most senior representative took to the stage to express his admiration for what we at Catch stood for, for what we had achieved and for how we'd done it. This ‘love fest’ went on for ...