For weeks at a time, nothing moved. No new artists. No new buyers. No new revenue. Martin Hosking, running a start-up that was meant to be a global marketplace, has said he asked himself why he was doing it at all. "Failure is so close and that makes you very anxious," he told SmartCompany years later. He admitted he thought about quitting several times.
It is an odd confession from a man whose early life looked like a ladder. Hosking took an honours degree in history and economics and was recruited straight out of university into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. He spent seven years there, serving in embassies in Egypt and Syria. He has described the work as heavy with responsibility and the training as excellent.
The first idea was modest: a place to show and sell the founders' own artwork.
What almost nobody connects to Redbubble is why he left. It was not ambition alone. His wife, a veterinarian, would have struggled to continue her profession if the couple kept moving from posting to posting. So he stopped. He later did an MBA at the University of Melbourne, spent two years at McKinsey, then moved into the internet, saying he wanted to be part of something big. He became a senior vice president at LookSmart, a company started by friends, and later chaired the software firm Aconex.
Redbubble began in 2006 with Hosking, Peter Styles and Paul Vanzella and about A$2 million of investor money. The first idea was modest: a place to show and sell the founders' own artwork. It quickly became bigger, a platform where artists upload designs and outside printers make and ship the products.
That is where the long wait began. Artists would not come without buyers, buyers would not come without artists, and the print partners needed volume before they would take part. Hosking has said the first three to four years were very hard, and real growth did not come until about 2010. What kept the team going, he said, was a clear purpose of serving artists, the "psychological prop that we needed." In hindsight he would have studied buyers earlier, because the company leaned too far toward the artist side.
In 2011 he left Aconex to run Redbubble full time. In May 2016 it listed on the ASX, raising about A$40 million at a value near A$288 million. The price of that success was a messy second act: he stepped down as chief executive in 2018, a successor was ousted in 2020, and lawsuits and a brand rebrand to Articore followed. Revenue in the 2023 financial year was A$290.7 million.
The lesson is in the choice at the start. Hosking gave up a diplomatic career for his wife's work, and then spent four years in the quiet valley between idea and traction. Patience was the product.