More and more independent fashion brands are making a move into online retailing. Assia Benmedjdoub meets Rae Begley, the Sydney-based fashion whiz who’s encouraging her high-profile clients to take the leap into e-commerce.
Presbyterians derive their name from the Greek word presbuteros, which means ‘elder’. This piece of Christian trivia is not unusual in itself, but the irony certainly isn’t lost when one arrives at the showroom of public relations agency Little Hero.
“It’s kind of cool, huh?” a very young Dane Shinton says as he opens to the doors to 142 Chalmers Street, Surry Hills. Shinton, the right-hand man to agency founder Rae Begley, is wearing skinny black jeans, a skinny frame and beaming through a halo of bleached blonde hair.
It is not the welcome one expects outside a Welsh Presbyterian house of worship. Six stained-glass windows and a conical roof stare down on the mezzanine level of the church, where Little Hero shares its space with a sales agency that represents youthwear brands such as Cheap Monday, Skinny Nelson and Ben Sherman.
It was partly because of this agency – ‘Live’ – that Begley, who launched Little Hero in Melbourne just over two years ago, decided to relocate her burgeoning business to Sydney.
“They were an agent for one of the labels we were working with and basically just wanted to meet up,” she says. “We did and they had a few new accounts for me. I came to Sydney with the idea that I’d take a showroom space that was temporary, then I got offered the church and signed four clients in one week.”
It should be noted here that Begley does not operate as a traditional public relations agent. For one, it’s not uncommon for clients such as Friedrich Gray and Romance Was Born – both of which walked away with the prestigious Woolmark Designer Award in 2008 and 2009 respectively – to contact Begley with production, ranging or sales enquiries.
This approach comes down to Begley’s professional background, having worked with UK retailer Antipodium and Metalicus before setting up her own business. Her current portfolio is approaching 20 apparel, footwear and accessory brands, with names such as Cheap Monday (denim), Bisonte (leather), Therese Rawsthorne (womenswear), Seventh Wonderland (swimwear), Marsu (footwear) and Matt Weston (jewellery).
“When I first start out with a client, we’ll sit down and talk through their collections,” Begley says. “I’ll then assist them with things like range planning, trends and quality of production.
“So for instance, when Friedrich Gray started with his first season, he was only doing menswear and I said to him, ‘I think you should start doing womenswear’. I would actually go to his studio and work through the ranges with him – what about more dresses? What about introducing this or that? Most of his sales now come from womenswear.”
This includes six recently secured wholesale accounts in Japan. For couture label Romance Was Born, the challenge was translating its editorial appeal into commercial success. Designers Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales had never had any difficulties attracting press coverage – in fact, they were selected for an unprecedented cover and six-page feature in Vogue Australia earlier this year – but their distribution pool had remained shallow since their launch in 2005.
“The thing that was great about their show [at Rosemount Australian Fashion Week] this year was not that they put on a really spectacular parade but they produced a great ready-to-wear collection,” Begley says. “David Jones looked at it but the label isn’t ready for that department store growth just yet; they have to get the support of their independents first.”
These include leading national boutiques such as Corner Shop, Pretty Dog, Alice Euphemia, LAX and an exclusive footwear collection for e-tailer mycatwalk.com. More recently, and perhaps more importantly, its stockist base swelled with the launch of an online store. This is a distribution strategy Begley is encouraging all of her clients to pursue.
“I work closely with each designer and part of what I’m really building up at the moment is their online marketing approach,” she explains, adding most brands at Little Hero are pitched at the Gen Y market.
“I see it as a huge growth area in terms of assisting designers to grow their brands through direct sales. They can build that as a whole other stockist base and have total control over the brand experience.”
While Begley says most marketing events are communicated through social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter, she is reluctant to “jump on the bandwagon just because everyone else is doing it”. Instead, she takes her cue from international brands and retailers that use these channels to promote their brands creatively.
“A lot of marketing campaigns in Australia are really safe at the moment when you compare them to a global level. [Japanese brand] Uniqlo for example do incredible films that then roll out onto Youtube and millions watch them online. There’s more interesting ways of approaching it than ‘we need an image in our windows’ or we’ll launch a Facebook page and that’s it. I’m much more a believer in the whole concept.”
So when Facebook event posts are created, they are likely to be part of a broader marketing strategy.
Earlier this year Little Hero staged an art gallery showcase for Cheap Monday jeans, featuring 50 numbered and customised denim installations and live music from local bands and DJs. Begley is cautious about using social networking platforms that make consumers think they are being “sold something”.
“I guess we do more grassroots events that are raw and connect with Gen Y instead,” she says. “It’s the same with my business – I’m not like, ‘here’s a press release, bang!, let’s send it out to 300 people and see who gets back to us with something’. I’ve worked really hard over the last 18 months to build relationships up with people in Sydney.”
Begley is now preparing to expand her business to include targeted multi-media campaigns for major fashion retailers. Working across look books, advertising shoots, online media and in-store imagery, this new arm has already had a soft launch through a commission with luxury leatherwear retail chain Bisonte. Seven models were selected for a series of portrait shots which reflected the brand’s key customer and the theme was then rolled across several media platforms.
“I have a film and photography background so I’m really interested in strong imagery,” Begley says, adding she was an arts graduate before entering the fashion realm. “I worked for the Portable Film Festival [in Melbourne] and got a lot of experience online by driving their e-commerce strategy. That’s why I feel it’s a natural move for me to move into projects using a creative team of stylists, photographers and makeup artists to create a whole concept based around their brand.”
And of course, bigger brands mean bigger budgets and big ideas. During a stint in London, Begley worked with a street magazine known as Super Super which made her more aware about what can grab the attention of Gen Y. Ironically, the social media platform was just becoming an imperative at the time.
“It was targeted at what was known back then as the Myspace generation so it was interesting to see how things change but don’t change at all. The [online] concept is still here but it’s just gotten that much bigger.”