The Daily Edited’s Alyce Tran On Building A Business And Feeling The Pressure To Grow

Co-founder of The Daily Edited, Alyce Tran, remembers once telling her English teacher she wanted to become the editor of Vogue Australia. Today, the life of a female founder appears as glamorous as a magazine editor in the golden age, so Tran’s reality hasn’t fallen too far from her career-goal tree. But it is a reality she has carved out for herself with pure hard work.

“There’s no how,” she said. “I just did it.” Tran, who grew up on a fruit farm in the Adelaide Hills, was working as a lawyer in Sydney when she co-founded The Daily Edited with a former co-worker, Tanya Liu. What began as a lifestyle blog evolved into a personalised accessories line – featuring monogrammable leather goods – that exploded.

“I just did it. There’s no how. If there was a to-do list, I just did the stuff. I didn’t think about things deeply. I still don’t think about things deeply now. You just do it,” Tran said. “I just think if you’re smart, and practical, you really can’t mess things up that much, right? Everyone always asks, ‘Did you have a mentor? And it’s like, ‘No, we were too busy to talk to anyone, we didn’t network.’ We still don’t do that now.”

“I nearly died in 2014 and 2015. It was a really difficult time in my life,” Tran said. However, within a year of selling the accessories, the accountant was asking what the company was now selling. “He’s like, ‘You’re making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. What is happening?’ I was so tired, I said to Tanya, ‘We need to quit our jobs, I can’t do this anymore.’ And she’s quite risk averse. Tanya’s probably the best co-founder someone can have because she’s very conservative. So it’s a nice balance. She made us save up nearly one million dollars before we quit our jobs because it then gave us basically more than a year’s runway in case it didn’t work.”