NATIONAL: Little Joe will resurrect its wholesale arm in 2010, six months after winding up its Myer concession store and three years after closing 70 international wholesale accounts.
The founders of the luxury label, Gail Elliott and Joe Coffey, have revealed their second foray will be vastly different to Little Joe’s origins as a wholesale business in 2002. The new operation will focus solely on Australian buyers and will be structured to complement what is now the cornerstone of the overhauled business: the Little Joe retail stores.
“The wholesale is an investment,” Coffey said. “There’s a lot of logistics [associated with wholesale] that act against a nimble retail brand, which is what we want to be.
“We want to be a brand that has new stock in store every month, whether it is Little Joe or non-Little Joe, and that is counter to the wholesale model. But now that we have this timetable established, we can offer both.”
The ‘timetable’ refers to the couple’s detailed plans, overseen by a third party consultant, to have wholesale back in operation for spring/summer 2010. The relaunch comes on the back of a “frustrating” attempt in 2008 to establish a concession outlet in Myer’s Sydney City store.
“It wasn’t working for a number of reasons,” Coffey said. “We’re not a big enough company to deal with the infrastructure of Myer. They have extremely generous return policies and we were finding that a lot of our stock was turning up in Tasmania and South Australia as a return four months later.”
While there “wasn’t any bad blood” with the department stores, Coffey said the label’s re-established wholesale arm will initially target smaller boutiques.
Also on the cards for 2010 is an increased focus on the Little Joe e-shop, Elliott revealed. While the web portal attracts buyers from regions as widespread as Russia, Ireland and Canada, it currently generates less than three per cent of the label’s overall sales.
“We have quite a few clients but we would definitely like to build that and that’s what we will be focusing on next year,” she said. “We’ve just brought someone in who will be at the office entirely to focus on building that side of the business.”
The investment in wholesaling and e-tailing is designed to add to the retail foundation of the business. Little Joe recently opened a 105 square metre store in Melbourne’s Chadstone complex, its first venture within a mainstream shopping centre.
“We’re at six stores now and we want to get between 10 and 12 in Australia,” Coffey said.
It was the couple’s desire to build a retail brand – in conjunction with their move from New York to Sydney in 2005, which placed them in counter seasons to the northern hemisphere – that led to the decision to sever their original international wholesale accounts.
The label currently has five to 10 indent stockists in Australia, including Sana in Perth and Qualia on Hamilton Island. Little Joe stocks a range of other labels including Paige, J Brand, Banjo & Matilda and Terry Biviano.
Erin O’Loughlin