University Advancement Office Alumni and Friends

Degree: Bachelor of Commerce (Honours) 2003

Current Position: Managing Director of Way Funky Company and co-founder of One Funky World Foundation.

Duncan Mc Lean, BCom (Honours) 2003, is the Managing Director of the Way Funky Company, which designs and produces the glam-electric swimwear labels Funky Trunks, Funkita and Kiargo. With his brother Gus, Duncan has founded the charity One Funky World Foundation which set up and funds a wheelchair workshop in Tonga. One Funky World also supports the Heartwell Fitness Scholarship Program, a sports program for children with disabilities in Melbourne. In 2007 Duncan won Young Victorian of the Year for his business acumen and his work with the charity.

THE idea to setup a swimwear company Way Funky came to Duncan while he was working at the local pool as a lifeguard, around the time he was completing his final exams for his Honours degree. He was standing at the pool trying to think about micro economics, but was distracted by the thought that there were no exciting swimwear choices for men.
“So that night I went home after work and remembered that Dad had a pair of bathers that were pretty bright and colourful when we were young," he recalls. "I found these bathers, and thought there were nothing like them, so I had a look around the internet. I couldn’t find anything for guys that were like it.  I went out and bought some fabric and sat down with Mum and we made this pair of trunks.  I wore the pair to training and got quite a bit of a laugh out of some of the guys when I was swimming.”

This inspired Duncan to purchase more fabric that his mum sewed into trunks and he sold at swimming training – they made up more orders to meet demand that summer. “I look back and think, they were pretty bad bathers back then, but it didn’t really matter, it was different, so people were buying it on that basis,” he says.

Not long after graduation Duncan was offered a position with the Reserve Bank. Although this would usually seem like a dream job for a young Commerce graduate, he was not so sure: “It felt like this big decision to me – as though I was giving up this business that I’d started, but I had to take the job.” Utilising the new skills he was learning at the bank, Duncan kept the business going in his spare time until he was at a stage where he felt he could leave and do it full time. 

By 2005 the business had grown well beyond what he and his mother could achieve around the kitchen table. It had been a steep learning curve researching, finding and creating the right chlorine resistant fabrics and manufacturing swimwear on a small scale. The next dive into the unknown was to find a manufacturer offshore. “It ended up being about 14 months of just trying to work out what to do about going to China with production. You’ve just got no idea really where to go so it was a long process of talking to different people and finding people that had done it before, and learning from their experiences,” he says. The result of all this hard work and perseverance is a company that now produces three swimwear labels: Funky Trunks for men, boys and toddler boys; Funkita for women and girls; and the Kiargo range of retro-glam swimwear for women.

Duncan is very committed to his business, but also wants to give something back. In 2007, he was named Young Victorian of the Year for the contributions he has made through One Funky World, a charity that he founded with his brother Gus. Their main focus has been working with people with disabilities through the Wheelchair Workshop Program in Tonga and their involvement in sponsoring a child through the Heartwell Fitness Scholarship Program, a sports program for children with disabilities in Melbourne.

Initially the Tonga project began when they took a group of school kids with them to Tonga to run a workshop exchanging skills in maintenance on the wheelchairs. Duncan says “the objective was to try and build (a) sustainable project for the Tongans to take on, instead of having all these wheelchairs just come into the country, for them to be able to actually pump up a tyre or just put a bit of oil, a bit of grease on the wheels and to remove the rust from the chairs, just so that they didn’t become scrap metal as soon as a tyre went down or something like that.” Gus McLean has returned to Tonga regularly and is working on lobbying the Tongan government for increased funding in the area of disability.

Future challenges for Duncan include the expansion of the swimwear labels into American and European markets. Now that he is an employer, he recognises the responsibility he has in creating a business that is sustainable for himself and his employees. He also wants to continue the charity work, in particular the work in Tonga to ensure that it too becomes sustainable and that the community has a sense of ownership in the project.

Duncan says his BCom gave him the confidence to know that if he worked hard he could manage a large workload and multiple deadlines. “I really think that the BCom and going through all the assignments and prioritising what you did was really good in making sure that in the future you knew you could still achieve as long as you put your head down and worked.”