Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Australia is about to celebrate its 20th anniversary with a reception at Bondi Icebergs.
As organisers place the final touches on an evening which will gather the luminaries of local design and retail, founder Simon Lock is seated behind a computer screen just a few hundred metres down the road.
It is thirty minutes before formal proceedings kick off – but it has taken him three years to get to this point.
“It has taken that long in incubation to get it off the ground – purely because the huge amount of work that needs to be done to establish this initiative.”
Lock is discussing Ordre, a world first online wholesale B2B platform launched by his Hong Kong-based company Aeon International. The screen in front of him showcases the digital interface, which launched quietly in December and is preparing to scale over coming months.
In its purest form, the invitation-only service operates as a global network enabling brands and buyers to conduct business online. Lock places its inspiration on the retail revolution brewing over the last five years; marked by the changing nature of international trade events, the growth of online retail and commercialisation of social media.
“Online retailing has developed a whole other outlet for consumers to purchase products, creating another avenue of competition.
“Department stores and boutiques have had to become more competitive in the way they do everything, including travel budgets to attend fashion weeks across the world.
“At the same time, we have seen the incredible impact social media is having on the fashion industry around the world. Designers are seeing the commercial benefits of using fashion week for brand building and direct sales.”
Sitting in the middle of this brew is what Lock describes as an “incredibly archaic global distribution model”.
“Designers are faced, at times, with having to send collections to multiple locations around the world in the hope of physically dragging buyers into showrooms to do business,” he says.
The strategy behind Ordre is aimed at streamlining this system in the wake of broader industry changes. While the solution seems simple, the development was not.
“What we did is we undertook analysis over an 18 month period,” Lock starts. “We divided the world to identify every retail market for ready-to-wear designers and we identified 93 countries. Within those countries, we identified 543 individual markets and within those markets, we profiled the department stores, multi-label boutiques and online retailers relevant to our model.”
It didn’t stop there.
“We then conducted data mining on each of those individual retail organisations to identify all their buyers and then reached out to key designers we wanted to have within our portfolio.”
The platform launched with 30 key designers, including Marni, Jason Wu, Jonathan Saunders, Zimmermann, Ellery and Mathew Williamson and there are plans to scale this to 140 this year.
There are currently 1864 retailers registered on the system, with another 600 left to upload. Current retailers include Barney’s, Harvey Nichols, Selfridges, Matches.com, Lane Crawford, David Jones and Corso Commo.
“We are not just online,” Lock adds. “We have Ordre managers in major cities across the world and we’re in the process of setting up nine of them. We already have managers in London, Paris, Milan, Tokyo, Sydney and Seoul so about half of those are already in place.
“They have a customer service focus, working with our retailers on the system and also working with designers in the market to guide them on how to target retailers through our platform.”
Lock’s intention for Ordre is as ambitious as his undertaking.
“In the global analysis we have done, we have identified a total of six tiers of fashion weeks around the world,” he explains. “Individually, they represent about 280 industry-based fashion weeks. Ordre is targeted only towards designers and retailers that are currently engaged in the top two tiers.
“Our research identified that based on these two tiers, that annually US$8 billion of wholesale orders are placed with designers participating at the events. Our target over the next 24 - 36 months is to grow our market share to 7.5 per cent of all these orders being transacted through Ordre. This represents a gross revenue of US$600 million.”
Ordre’s financial model centres on a 7.5 per cent commissions on all wholesale orders placed through the platform, lower than the industry standard of 15 per cent. At the back-end, it has completed a successful early stage investors program with a Series A funding round set to raise another $5 million when it closes on June 30. It will most likely undertake Series B at the end of this year.
Lock firmly believes the service will outperform potential competitors.
“There’s a lot of people involved in wholesale online. A lot of people in the industry are using Joor, which is a great app but more applicable to taking orders within a showroom. But our strategy is a closed retail network to closed designers. This type of retail network has never been done before, ever by anybody.”
And with that, Lock folds his laptop and prepares to celebrate where his fashion journey first started. On the real-time runway.