Last week Accent Group announced it had acquired activewear eCommerce business Stylerunner.
The deal included the rights to the Stylerunner name, trademarks, customers and website and came after Stylerunner announced it had appointed receivers on October 28.
Speaking to Ragtrader, Accent Group CEO Daniel Agostinelli discusses the acquisition and what's on the cards for the Stylerunner business.
Can you detail the acquisition process?
We always admired what they were doing, particularly as they had a wellness piece and a yoga piece, which is a little bit diverse from what we do every day on footwear, but it also had footwear so it made sense.
We were also a small supplier to them and felt we could supply them more.
We feel it’s a market that’s definitely growing – the wellness and yoga piece – as a staple for women’s fashion in general. It’s now becoming a fashion item rather than just yoga wear.
Brands like Jaggad and P.E. Nation are making good noise but also the attraction was that they have three in-house brands which could grow vertically for us.
Also the fact that they already have an international customer base which was very attractive to us, together with the best part of 500,000 database which is quite strong.
The brand itself Stylerunner is quite well known – for a little business they’ve done a fantastic job in marketing that brand and positioning it exactly where it needs to be positioned.
So we had been looking at it for some time and it just happened that there was an approach if we were interested in looking at it, we had a good look and we felt that we could add our back-end smarts.
By that I mean we have a distribution centre, we have a great digital business led by Mark Teperson and we also have the ability to crank up the marketing and put more products into that site.
What has happened so far since the acquisition?
Not a whole lot.
We have a 100 day plan that we’re working on but Julie and the team are all fantastic people who will remain in the business – we may add a few people to it to allow it to grow – and then we will work on our 100 day plan towards I guess maybe a relaunch with more products on there as we move forward.
It’s very early days so not a whole lot has happened.
What is the plan for how the business will operate?
The plan is that the business will remain in the current premises in Sydney making sure that it keeps its own flavour and culture.
We have no plans to change the front end too much with the way that culture works, but we do want to help with our back-end procedures that will allow it to have a foundation for it to do better in the market.
You plan to do bricks-and-mortar – how will you execute this?
Definitely bricks-and-mortar is what attracted me to the business.
I feel it needs some stores in the market in the right places and once we work out what is right we will certainly look to potentially open a couple of stores in 2020.
Time frame is not even discussed yet but there’s already interest from many different landlords.
We’ve just got to get a look that resonates with that consumer and allows that product to shine.
When I was visiting your offices last year you said that Accent was on the way to becoming a billion-dollar business – are these strategic acquisitions part of the strategy to become that billion-dollar business you were talking about?
Absolutely, 100%.
That’s where we’re headed. We simply want to grow our market share in businesses that are aligned with our current business that have a dotted line to the same consumer.
That’s where we’ve had success to date so we want to grow that if we can.
We have a great bunch of people and a team that are dedicated to wanting to do that so everything’s aligned at this stage.