Who works here
Five women in a men’s industry
Transport and logistics in Australia is more than three quarters men. The Red Nav office in Wangara is five women. Of the roughly 754,500 people working in transport, postal and warehousing in Australia, only 22 per cent, about 166,000, are women. Five of them run this office.
That was not a plan. There is no diversity statement at the bottom of this page.
Not a policy. Just who turned up and stayed.
Nobody set out to change anything here. Suzette started Red Nav, people came to work, and the five who stayed happened to be women.
The figure above comes from Jobs and Skills Australia, drawn from the ABS Labour Force Survey. Of the roughly 754,500 people working in transport, postal and warehousing, about 166,000 are women. If you want to follow the subject properly, the federal government runs National Women in Transport, and the Freight & Trade Alliance runs a Women in Logistics network for the forwarding end of the industry.
We are not part of either. We are five women who ended up in the same office.
Why mention it at all?
Because Suzette thinks it changed what it feels like to be a customer here, and after forty years in freight she has seen enough of both to know the difference.
There is a bell on the desk. It gets rung every time a new job comes in. It is not sophisticated. It is a small business that is still pleased when somebody chooses it.
“We value kindness, understanding and empathy. We often get clients who have never shipped anything before. They sometimes feel overwhelmed by the experience, and it is our job to make them feel safe. How do we do this? By explaining the process and by keeping them informed.”
Suzette van der Heijden
What it actually looks like
That is not a slogan. It is an attitude, and it shows up in specific things.
You get photographs
When your cargo is being loaded, we send you pictures of it. No other freight forwarder in Perth advertises that. When you have money tied up in a shipment somewhere between a factory in China and a wharf in Fremantle, seeing it on a truck is worth more than a tracking number.
You get told before you have to ask
Most of the anxiety in freight comes from silence. A vessel is delayed and nobody says anything for four days. We would rather ring you with bad news early than good news late.
You get a person
Not a portal, not a ticket number. There are five of us. One of us will know your shipment.
What this page is not
It is not an argument that women are better at freight forwarding. There is no evidence for that and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Plenty of very good forwarders in this city are run by men.
It is an explanation of why a small Perth company works the way it does, offered because people asked, and because the industry looks a particular way and this office does not.
If you would rather just talk about freight
That is fine too. We are freight forwarders in Wangara, mostly bringing cargo into Australia from China and the rest of Asia, from Africa, Europe and America, and exporting from Australia to wherever it needs to go.
Here is what we move, and here is how to get a quote.
Or ring 08 9303 2110. One of the five of us will answer, and we will talk freight.