When Anthony Nappa started selling hair products out of the corner of his parents’ warehouse as a teen, he never could have imagined what the side hustle would become. The business has grown from a small eBay store to a multi-million dollar beauty empire that is rapidly expanding its physical presence across Australia.

Founded as a side project in 2012 when Nappa was 19 years old, Oz Hair & Beauty posted $100 million in revenue in the past financial year and now employs more than 500 staff across the country. It has opened 30 new stores in the past three years, with the aim of expanding to 50 stores by the end of the next financial year.

Nappa, now 33, told Yahoo Finance it was a far cry from his original plan when he was a teenager. Back then, he was working part-time as a labourer while studying Commerce at university.

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“My plan was to live at home, study at uni, while I’m studying, save as much money as possible and by the time I graduate, put a down payment on a house and have a graduate job,” he said.

But when his labouring boss suddenly left the country, Nappa found himself out of a job. His parents, Elio and Venessa Nappa, owned a number of Oz Hair hairdressing salons in Sydney, so he decided to start selling the salon’s hair products on eBay.

Nappa invested $10,000 of his savings into the business and saw sales start picking up when he migrated from an eBay store to a proper website and later Shopify.

“Long story short, it really took off. I was working at the back of the warehouse, and then I had to lease the whole warehouse,” he said.

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Growing bricks and mortar presence

It was during the pandemic that business really “boomed”, Nappa said. In 2019, annual revenue sat at about $24 million, but by 2021, turnover had reached $40 million.

In 2021, Oz Hair & Beauty received backing from billionaire Brett Blundy’s BBRC and Daniel Agostinelli, CEO of Accent Group, which runs shoe retail chains like Platypus and Hype.

Nappa said part of the deal included buying his parents’ store in the QVB, which was then rejigged in 2022 into a fully fledged retail store.

“That increased sales by nearly double. So we thought we’ve got something here now,” Nappa said.

At a time when many discretionary retailers are reducing their physical footprints, Oz Hair & Beauty has taken the opposite approach.