Australian swimwear label Bondi Born participated in Mercedes Benz Fashion Week Australia (MBFWA) for the first time this year.
Debuting its swimwear and resort collection at the show, the label came away with nine local and international stockists including Net-A-Porter, David Jones and Harvey Nichols.
Speaking to Ragtrader, Bondi Born founder and CEO Dale McCarthy details the success the brand found at the show, the changes that have occurred since and what's on the cards for Bondi Born in the next 12 months.
What were your expectations going into the show?
Bondi Born had been successfully selling internationally for three seasons and while we know consumers absolutely love our swimwear, we felt the brand was really flying under the radar as far as elite retailers and fashion press went.
So our objective going into the show was to introduce ourselves to the industry and hopefully become “part of the conversation” with other Australian fashion designers.
We are a small team, it was our first MBFWA show and the first time we’d shown our resort wear collection, so while I was quietly confident, I genuinely didn’t know what to expect.
Thankfully, our talented Creative Director, Karla Clarke, has spent her career in the fashion industry, styled many fashion shows herself and pulled together a fantastic team of fashion week experts to help us. So I put my trust in her and her team and let the magic happen.
Were there any retailers you were particularly interested in working with? Why?
Yes there were. As a luxury brand, we want Bondi Born to stocked in select retailers. We want to build long term partnerships with innovative retailers who understand and value our brand and we can work with together to grow.
Fashion Week was such an incredible opportunity as we personally invited the head buyers from select prestige retailers to attend our show and we were very honoured that most came.
Net-a-Porter, Moda Operandi, Mode Sportif, David Jones and Browns of London were all at the show and have all now picked up Bondi Born.
How is the business going post-MBFWA? What changes have occurred since then? What challenges have you overcome?
Doing MBFWA was a tipping point in the journey of Bondi Born. We are thrilled that the brand is now being stocked by some of the world’s best retailers and we now have the attention of the fashion press.
Thankfully, we’ve spent the last three years perfecting the product, the team and the brand, so we were ready for this and now we are in a phase of rapid growth.
The biggest challenge has been getting the business in a position to meet the demands of the large international retailers. We previously did only one major swimwear collection each year and sold it online and into retail into the different hemisphere’s respective spring/summer markets.
Now we are moving to a northern hemisphere season cycle and releasing collections of swim with complementary resort wear for three markets: Resort, Spring Summer and High Summer.
It has put a huge amount of pressure on our team. We are adding staff and moving into a larger warehouse office and balancing the demands of future growth with the reality of current cash flow.
Bondi Born at MBFWA - Photo by Lucas Dawson
Leaving the show with nine stockists is an impressive feat – how is the business keeping up with the volume?
Apart from me, the core members of the Bondi Born team are highly experienced with many years of luxury fashion brands under their belts, so they haven’t been phased at all by it.
We work with only the best makers in Sydney that are capable of producing high volumes and our fabric mills in Italy and Japan are world class and used to fashion’s seasonal deadlines, so being able to physically produce the increased volume of stock made in Australia isn’t a challenge and we aim to always keep our swim and resort wear production locally.
The biggest pressure on the business is the need to add staff as well as pay for all the raw materials and production up front to ship around the world to retailers that only pay after delivery. Fashion is a challenging business on cashflow!
It’s been very stressful and a huge amount of work for the team, but they are all individually amazing people who are on board for the journey with Bondi Born.
What are the differences between working with local vs. international retailers?
The great thing about working with local retailers is the ease of building personal and marketing relationships.
I can jump on the phone or a plane and get in front of them and plan co-marketing activities together to build Bondi Born within their doors.
By way of contrast, we managed to bring on an elite group of Middle Eastern retailers during Resort market in Paris and it feels like another world away.
I know very little about their businesses, their customers or what marketing opportunities we could do to support them. And there is only so much time and resources at the moment.
But eventually I will make a trip there so we can help them build Bondi Born in their geography.
What is the mix of supply to online vs. bricks and mortar?
When I launched the brand in 2015 noone thought women would ever buy luxury swimwear online in serious volume, as swimwear is all about fit.
However, over the past two years we have managed to successfully build our own online business in Australia, New Zealand and the US and it continues to show strong signs of growth.
However, for the foreseeable future, a significant number of women still prefer to try and buy in-store, so we will continue to strongly support our bricks and mortar retailers to answer this need and increase the exposure of the brand internationally.
Right now, excluding our own sites, our supply would be 50/50 online to bricks and mortar retailers, but we have only scratched the surface of bricks-and-mortar department stores globally and I expect we’ll see strong growth from them in new geographies over the next three to five years.
What are the plans for the business in the next 12 months?
Each year we spend significant amounts of time and resource on R&D, finding sustainably produced fabrics that are offer superior functional benefits for our swimwear.
In the coming season we’re releasing a new collection that uses our new Singuleur fabric that moves with the body like a second skin, which will enable us to expand our catalogue of swim designs, which is exciting.
From a business point of view we will continue to grow our team and hone our systems and processes so that we successfully turn from a small designer into a world class brand servicing major retailers whilst our expanding ecommerce channels. There’s a lot to do!
It’s important to us that we do this without ever compromising on quality, or put profit before people or lose the joy of creativity in the process. So hopefully the team and I will be leaning into the challenges and enjoying the ride!