How Brittney Saunders found business success by saying 'yes' and chasing joy

Brittney Saunders has transformed her fashion label, Fayt, from a bootstrapped garage side hustle into a booming national empire in just a few years, learning quickly that visibility is the hardest currency to earn. 

It’s a reality that sits at the heart of CommBank’s Business Backing Business campaign, which Brittney has joined in order to leverage her platform to help elevate the profiles of up-and-coming Aussie business owners. The founder is joined by chef Adam Liaw and landscaper Jamie Durie to share their spotlights with deserving businesses. 

Turning a hobby into a YouTube following 

By age 21, Brittney had worked 20 jobs and she’d hated every single one of them. “I was a serial quitter, which I think a lot of people might see as a bad thing,” she says. “But I just couldn’t handle the thought of waking up every day for a job I didn’t like.” 

Rather than viewing each resignation as a failure, Brittney saw her first work experiments as market research. “I’ve always had a burning desire to keep looking until I found a job that brought me joy.” 

From as early as she can remember, the fashion founder has had an entrepreneurial spirit – setting up trestle tables outside her house to sell things, begging for chores to make pocket money and, in her teen years, teaching herself to do spray tans so she could charge for them. 

“I didn’t have the language for what that was and I certainly didn’t learn about entrepreneurship at school,” she says. “I always thought of these projects as little hobbies that I could just make a little money out of, rather than a career path.” 

But by 21, one of these hobbies – doing make-up tutorials on YouTube – had started to blossom into the promise of more. “I had built up about 80,000 followers on YouTube, which doesn’t sound like much these days but it was a pretty big deal back then.” The explosion of Instagram around this time meant she was able to leverage her existing community onto the image-sharing platform, too, fuelling her to quit her very last role as someone else’s employee. 

Starting a fashion label 

“Between 21 and 24, I built my YouTube following to one million subscribers,” says Brittney. “I worked a lot with brands, as part of the first generation of influencers in Australia.” 

And then came the idea for Fayt – a fashion label that could bridge the gap between trend-driven style and genuine inclusivity. “I’d been dabbling in all kinds of business ideas at the time so I thought nothing of starting this brand,” she says. “I knew I had an online audience to sell to but I knew nothing about business.” Not to be deterred, she googled “How do I start a fashion label?” and was soon setting one up in her garage in Newcastle, NSW. “My partner was working as an electrician and he’d come home from work and help me pack orders. I had no idea what I was doing.” 

But that relentless desire for joy had set Brittney in good stead. What followed were a series of choices – to which the business owner had the same answer each time. Yes. 

Pushing through doubt 

“I’ve always been a ‘yes’ person,” says Brittney. “Quitting my job to focus on YouTube was a huge risk that paid off so when it came to hiring an employee, I said ‘yes’ to that, too – even though I was worried I was going to run out of money and not be able to pay her or that I wouldn’t have enough work for her to do.” 

Brittney’s worries were unfounded. Today, Fayt is a multichannel retailer with several bricks-and-mortar stores around Australia, often choosing locations based directly on requests from its online community. The brand’s rapid growth is largely attributed to this community-first strategy, where Brittney uses social media to solicit real-time feedback on designs and business decisions. 

Despite her success, Brittney insists she’s still simply learning as she goes. “Business is just making mistakes and learning better for next time. That’s the only way that you can grow. No-one is born knowing how to run a business and there’s also not one specific way to start and run a business.” 

And while she recognises there have been learnings along the way, Brittney wouldn’t trade her journey. “I can’t look back and say, ‘Oh, I wish I knew that back then,’ because I think all the mistakes you make along the way are what build you into the business owner you are today.” 

Related articles

• Jamie Durie’s biggest learnings as a business owner
• Adam Liaw’s key lessons for business owners
• The young entrepreneurs with a bold idea that worked

Published: 4 March 2026