How The Beach People fights its roundie towel rip-offs

Emma Henderson and Victoria Beattie have built an international business on the back of a distinctive beach towel.

However, the runaway success of the Beach People's round beach towels has led to a flood of imitators, with similar-looking round towels now sold around Australia.

Reinventing the textile industry

Henderson says the Beach People was the first to market after she came up with the idea for a round beach towel while on maternity leave and enlisted her sister as her business partner.

"We had to find a manufacturer because it was a product that was completely new to market so we were reinventing the textile industry globally which we didn't realise we were doing at the time," Henderson says. "It took a long time because nobody had the machinery to make it. It was a pioneering venture."

"You know that saying, 'don't put all your eggs in one basket', we put all our eggs in one basket," Henderson says. "But it wasn't a basket, it was a towel."

The sisters' belief in their product paid off with the Beach People's 'roundie' towels becoming a global phenomenon.

"In Australia, it was all a bit domino effect," Henderson says. "At one stage, we had 500 wholesale inquiries in our inbox. We couldn't keep up with it." Read more