Where is Australia’s youngest university student now?

Mel Myers Case Study

They have changed the way photography is digitally altered in the real estate sphere and have become extremely popular with real estate agents and property managers, as they now have the option of adding virtual furniture to property photos, and changing or enhancing site and floor plans.

At the age of 12 most kids are playing computer games and transitioning into high school, but this wasn’t the case for Mel Myers. At that tender age he became Australia’s youngest university student and then went on to become Director of successful Australian photography start-up, BoxBrownie.com. Mel started studying mathematics and IT subjects externally at Deakin University through open learning and his only guidance was from textbooks and course resources. By the age of 14, he was part of the first intake of students to attend the University of the Sunshine Coast.

“Attending university at a young age was a fantastic experience and academically I was treated the same as everyone else which was perfect. Being younger than my classmates and under 18 made social gatherings outside of university hours tricky, but the hardest part was not being able to drive. However, at the time I really didn’t know any better or what I was missing out on. So, perhaps ignorance really is bliss!”

A few years down the track saw Mel starting and selling his first online shop with a business partner and graduating with a Bachelor’s Degree in Business, majoring in Information Systems. Then he started his own online shop selling mail order computer software, built a search engine and developed a web business and team now known as Jetpack.

Mel ventured out from his business and through mutual connections and various encounters, met Brad Filliponi and Craig Morrison, Co-Founders of BoxBrownie.com. Given Brad was a professional real estate photographer and Craig’s IT background, the pair saw a gap in the photography editing industry and the concept of BoxBrownie.com was established.

Box Brownie is a cloud-based software system designed to make image editing fast, easy and affordable. It offers a wide range of services including photography retouching services, floor plans, 3D rendering, copywriting and more. The business is growing at a rapid rate with currently over 3000 customers and quarterly growth of 56%.

BoxBrownie.com is suitable for everyone from real estate agents to developers, professional photographers to amateurs and online retailers who want to showcase their products with professional photos.

Initially, the company was manually sending photos to clients. Mel soon found that they needed to modify the website into a system that is designed to be scalable in the long term. After relaunching the site twice, changing the product offering and figuring out how to make the business sustainable, the third time really was the charm for BoxBrownie.com.

They have changed the way photography is digitally altered in the real estate sphere and have become extremely popular with real estate agents and property managers as they now have the option of adding virtual furniture and additions to property photos, changing or enhancing site and floor plans and more.

Their real estate agency clients include Ray White, Century 21, Stockland, CBRE, Richardson & Wrench, Harcourts, Barry Plant, LJ Hooker, Elders, First National, and Raine&Horne.

The company has recently launched in the US and UK, which is already generating 5% of their revenue. In the future, they plan to continue being a disruptive innovator in the photography market and to expand further into the global real estate and property industry.