Birdsnest in the hand worth two in the bush

It is symbolic of change, in country towns and everywhere else, that Ms Cay's online business, birdsnest.com.au occupies what was once the Grace Brothers department store.

Across an arcade is the former IGA supermarket - now turned into the Birdnest warehouse.

In these premises, refitted to a minimalist modern whiteness, Birdsnest employs 94 people in the business of providing retail therapy to Australian women.

While many retailers despair at the Internet's destruction of traditional bricks-and-mortar businesses, Birdnest retains the physical storefront that the online business was built on, and is selling more through the door than ever.

But if the physical store has grown, birdsnest.com.au is 15 times bigger than the store.

Behind the shop, in an open-plan workroom where Ms Cay's desk is indistinguishable from the other work-cluttered desks, a team of mostly women wrap and dispatch 700-1000 parcels a day - 1400 the day before the Easter weekend.

The parcels contain dresses, shoes and accessories; tissue-wrapped, accompanied by a hand-written note and - key to the success of Birdsnest - a 100-day return guarantee.

"We expect about 20 per cent returns," Ms Cay said. "If you go into a changeroom with five items of clothing, you're unlikely to be happy with all five."

Cooma born and bred, Ms Cay left the town in 1996 to study. She vowed not to return to Cooma, and not to marry a farmer - and after studying information technology and working in e-commerce, naturally did both.

She told her husband, Oli Cay, that if she was going to live on a farm, she needed something to get out of bed for in the morning. In 2004, she bought an existing clothing shop, High Country Outfitters, and began her career as a retailer.

Women, Ms Cay observed, seek a lot more from shopping than just an article of clothing. In learning about the reinforcement of identity that shopping can provide, she learned that she was "not just in the business of selling frocks".

By 2008, aided by her insights into retail psychology, the store had an annual turnover of $1 million. Ms Cay had pretty much exhausted her capacity for growth.

She put together an online business plan and approached 85 Australian clothing labels, including names like Esprit, JAG and Charlie Brown, with a proposal to sell some of their range through her startup business, Birdnest.

Eighty of the labels she approached said yes.

In retrospect, Ms Cay muses, she flew under the radar.

Online retailing wasn't yet the phenomenon it has become - many of the labels she approached now have their own online presence, although they still sell through Birdsnest - and as a small non-threatening startup, she got access that might have been denied a bigger enterprise.

From there, Birdnest has been on a steady growth path.

Ms Cay said she made mistakes. For instance, early on the site focused wholly on the retail experience, and ignored Google.

It soon became evident that ignoring Google was bad for business. The entire site was rebuilt to ensure that birdsnest.com.au got premier place in Google's search rankings.

But on the other hand, by untethering a business from geography, the internet allows businesses to flourish in low-cost out-of-the way places - ie. Cooma.

Cooma does have one advantage not enjoyed by many country towns. An hour from Canberra, it can use Australia Post's one-day Express Post service to capital cities.

Unsurprisingly, Ms Cay is enthusiastic about the potential for the internet to build business capacity in the bush.

There are some logistics challenges, but costs are lower, "and Google doesn't care where you are".

Her own business now has enough gravitational pull to attract experienced employees out of the capital cities to her base at Cooma.

That's easier with older people looking for a treechange, Ms Cay acknowledges, and it’s harder to get younger people reluctant to leave the bright lights.

That hasn't stopped two recently-graduated design students laying aside ambitions for Paris/New York/London and moving to Cooma.

Their reward: designing the first items for Birdsnest's own label, to be launched later this year.

Getting experienced IT technicians is a particular issue - but the beauty of the Internet is that its components can live everywhere.

Birdsnest has a couple of computer servers in Cooma, but most of its computing power sits in Brisbane.

Cooma isn't hooked up to the NBN, although Ms Cay is a fan of the NBN principle. It instead accesses the online world through community broadband initiative CountryTell.

The Internet has untethered retail and manufacturing from the need to be in a specific place.

Hiut Denim www.hiutdenim.co.uk has reopened a factory in the Welsh town of Cardigan, population 4000, which lost its small jeans manufacturing business in the early 1980s.

The entrepreneurs behind Hiut have bought a small Cardigan factory and its equipment, and are building the business by selling a limited number of high-priced jeans to discerning buyers.

The Shorey family in Maine, USA, have put their century of shoe-making expertise online at www.quoddy.com, selling hand-made shoes inspired by Indian moccasins.

Etsy au.etsy.com has built an online marketplace for handmade or "vintage" goods, and arts and crafts supplies, that provides anyone with a talent for handicrafts with a virtual storefront to a huge customer base.