Rainbow Store
Online Pride Shop Merchandise

Established 18 January 2000
Sydney Australia

While working for a very large accounting firm in 1999, The Owners decided to create a hobby business.

The Owners called their new business Rainbow Store, and on 18 January 2000 the business was registered.

We tried to design the web pages ourselves but the concept became daunting and we decided in favour of a commercially available software program.

We then began ordering products from overseas as nothing was available in Australia especially in the quantities we required. It was a very time consuming process hunting down the manufacturers and suppliers.

We continued to build our web site adding product pictures and descriptions and then they went live.

We waited for an order, and waited and more waiting until they received their first order.
Surprisingly the customer who was placing the order lived in the US and was ordering products that we had only just received from the US a week earlier.
We were shipping US products back to the US. This was bizarre.
(This first customer is still a regular customer today and orders from us at least 5 times a year, every year and has been doing so for over 25 years).

Five days later we received the next order and then each week we received another order.
We coped with this volume but then we began receiving an order every day, then 15 orders a day and of course now there are numerous orders received every single day from all over the world.

We were on our way from what started out as a hobby business to becoming a fully operational online retail business serving the worldwide Gay and Lesbian community.

More hard work was ahead of us as we designed our letterhead, business cards and product labels.
Then came the big task of packing the products into bags and applying the labels.

Now we got bold and knowing nothing about manufacturing we embarked on designing and getting exclusive products manufactured for us.
A big task designing, getting moulds made and supervising the manufacture from beginning to end.

We struggled on and bought an accounting system to help manage our inventory and sales. This automated many manual tasks and gave us some time to devote to other procedures.

Then we decided to attend the 2000 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Fair Day. We had help from friends and we made a profit on the day after paying stall hire and staff wages. It was a good day and we learned a lot. We then started attending Fair Days in Australia and overseas each year and have been doing this now for over 24 years.

We currently attend over 20 Fair Day festivals each year throughout Australia having a market stall at each one.

Storage "oh my goodness" what a job but we now have storage facilities for all our containers. With over 1500 different products available and with quantities ranging from 10 to 3000 pieces for each product.
This is why we now have two large storage warehouse facilities.
Everything has been itemised and thankfully we have an excellent inventory control system in place.

We both worked long hours and went without many of the relaxing things in life that possibly you may take for granted. We had no time to sit in a coffee shop or to go to a bar for a few drinks.

We have no regrets and we have everything well organised now and are ready at short notice to attend the many opportunities to show our Pride products.

Rainbow Store has grown to over 14 website domains and we have also moved into other outlets. This was difficult to operate at first but we now have a steady reliable base of customers both in Australia and overseas.

Our future direction is with Rainbow Store and being able to supply our customers with high quality genuine merchandise for the LGBTI and Diverse communities.

And we plan to continue to do this for at least the next 20 years and beyond.

Rainbow Store is here to stay … with a passion.

Updated 1 July 2024