I often used to get asked when I joined my father, why would you join your father and not do something on your own? And my typical answer to that was, it was either that or working for someone else's father. I was just lucky that he went into the beauty industry and not into panel beating or something like that.

For me, the job of the brand, or at least the people behind the brand, is a relentless pursuit of creating the same perception in everybody's mind. That sounds challenging, but if you had to break it down into experiences, it actually becomes more manageable.

The time when brand-building becomes really hard for me is when you're just not clear on your purpose, when you don't understand your reason for being or existing in the world and when your customers equally don't understand it. That's when you're kind of really swimming upstream.

We looked at five basic tenets when I was building the Sorbet brand. The first one was this clear purpose that I talk about a lot. Just really understanding why you exist in the world, and I probably sound like a broken record, but I genuinely believe that that is a solid foundation to build a brand off of. 

People think that brand building is your marketing calendar, your social media strategy, your logo, the photography that you use. And it is that, but there are way more significant elements and questions that come into brand-building that people don't think fall into the concept of branding. That's things like, what's your return policy. Have you created policies in your company that could frustrate the customer? How easy is it to get hold of you and talk to you guys directly? What's the culture? How do you treat your staff? How do they talk about you? 

Complaints and feedback are so important inside the company, between employer and employee, and externally as well. So if you read Reed Hastings book, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention, he talks about how he built this culture of radical candour, which is giving people feedback because it only makes them better. In typical, traditional organisations, people are really nervous to give feedback.

It's difficult to choose because I feel like there were so many defining factors along the way. But if I had to look at three, I would say that we built this culture of service, where it was not just a culture that was left to its own devices. 

I always loved the idea of having mentor brands. I was so young when I started at Sorbet and I'd never run a marketing department or managed people, but I always had these mentor brands in the back of my mind that I would go to for inspiration and guidance. I remember two specifically back then, 10 years ago, that I loved and one of them was Woolworths.

We were obsessed with culture at Sorbet. We used to call my father the Culture King because it was so important to our everyday life at Sorbet. So much so that he used to do the induction training for every single new person that started at Sorbet, and you couldn't start in a salon or in the head office without going on his induction training. 

I've always wanted to build a brand, so it wasn't the textbook typical way that you figure out a business or you start a business. It wasn't like there was this glaring problem that I had to fix. It was kind of this idea of, I want to build a brand. I found a friend that I knew from school, who had also just had a baby and she wasn't doing anything - equally creative and equally loves the brand-building process. And I said to her, we should do something together.