Two weeks after Catherine Taouk rejoined her family business in 2012, she resigned and never set foot in the warehouses she and her sisters had spent their childhoods in.
“The sad part is that I know had we been given the green light and some openness to change the business at the time, we would be able to turn the ship around,” she recalled in an article for Ragtrader earlier this year.
That ship was iconic womenswear chain Supre, founded by parents Hans and Helen van der Meulen in 1984, and the crew attempting to steer a new course were Catherine and her sisters Nikki and Anna.
The proposal and strategy involved 25 touch points which would save the company $2 million in excess overheads, as well as untapped opportunities in product ranging and store upgrades.
A year after Taouk’s proposal received the red light, retail giant Cotton On Group acquired the 157 store network and vowed to revive the embattled icon to its earlier glory. In January this year, former Sportsgirl CEO Elle Roseby stepped into the role of general manager and commenced a rapid turnaround of the chain.
Since her appointment, four new-look stores have already opened as part of a retail face lift that will roll out across its now 125 stores across Australia and New Zealand. Roseby’s determination and revival strategy mirrors that of Taouk and her sisters, superseded only by the almost Herculean effort that has taken place behind the scenes.
“First of all, there was no head office staff, remembering that the head office was in Sydney,” Roseby reveals. “A lot of those people were offered roles and for whatever reason, couldn’t come down to Melbourne, where Cotton On Group is based. To have 42 people who have never worked with each other before, never worked in Cotton On, and have never worked in Supre, to suddenly come together and work in a really fast-paced and dynamic environment has certainly been very rewarding for everyone.”
Roseby started the recruitment process by appointing seven executive positions, ranging from e-commerce to visual merchandising, and allowed them to choose their own staff.
“For me, it was about having my executive team in place and then for them to be accountable for the teams they were recruiting. I am all for people taking responsibility for who they recruit rather than inheriting a team. I think that was a part of the attraction to everyone.”
What followed was a six-week intensive research program into the brand, analysing periods of success and challenges.
“Those six weeks included a lot of online research, a lot of focus groups and also very importantly, tapping into the intellectual property in the business,” Roseby says. “The strategist working on the project actually went out to stores and spoke to a lot of the leaders and store managers that had been in the business for a long time. The relationship with our stores team is absolutely paramount in a lot of the decisions we make from ranging to how we go to market.”
One of the first major initiatives involved flying store managers from across Australia and New Zealand to the new head office in Geelong. There, staff spent two and a half days in briefings around the new vision for Supre.
“What we’ve said is this brand is about hot fashion and hot price,” Roseby says. “I think what’s really changed for us is the channels of how we need to communicate that to our customers.”
A key component of this is a new digital platform, which will launch next year. The current platform is around eight years old, Roseby explains, and missing critical factors such as mobile responsive functions for an increasingly tech-savvy audience. This hasn’t stopped the brand from working on other online initiatives as the platform is built.
“Our Instagram base in February was sitting at 30,000,” Roseby starts. “We are at over 100,000 which is just phenomenal numbers in a matter of months. There has been a great deal of effort into our imagery and our content and being very aware of who our customer is and delivering really interesting content.”
This strategy includes partnerships with Instagram stars such as Sarah Ellen, who has 650,000 followers, on multi-channel campaigns that span online and in-stores.
“Imagery changes every month. One of the biggest changes you would see if you look at our stores today is that yeah, we actually have imagery. We never used to have imagery. The front of the store looks completely different and, after receiving feedback that our stores were too congested, we’ve introduced a level of process into the merchandising.”
Roseby admits this has been a challenging process, having inherited five different store designs with stores ranging from 90sqm to 500sqm in size.
“I think it’s about making sure there is a level of structure in our stores and how they need to be laid out. How can we best present the stock with a very different merchandising system that we’d ideally like to have? There’s a puck system which is very different to post and rail, one table versus three, so our merchandisers are creating solutions for these.”
The final major turnaround has been in product, a process made easier by the enormous buying power of its new parent company. Prior to its acquisition, Roseby explains, Supre had just one vendor.
“And whilst that vendor is still in the business, what we’ve tried to do is extend our product mix and that variety comes from a very different supply mix. That’s been very critical. Cotton On have exceptional relationships with their factories, exceptional logistics, that will be to Supre’s benefit in time.”
Staple Supre basics have been extended with more woven garments, fashion-forward ranging and off-the-body silhouettes. Pricing has remained competitive, with some key points dropping across several lines. This includes staple elastic shorts, lowering from $25 to $20.
“There are a lot of examples like that where we’ve been keener on our price point because of the way we start to buy,” Roseby says. “So we’re just probably smarter with what we’re putting down with our factories. We’re buying 50,000 units of that instead of buying 10,000 units so we can get better pricing from that point of view and pass it on.
“We have styles hitting every single week. What you would see is definitely an increase in the level of fashionability than what there has been for the last three years.”
At the time of Supre’s acquisition, Cotton On hinted at plans to expand the brand internationally, particularly in the Asian and South African markets. For Roseby, the focus is still squarely on home soil.
“We need to be really good here first. The benefit once again for this brand is being part of Cotton On Group, which has 1300 stores across the world and brands that are international except for us. When we are ready, when we know we’ve done a really good job here, then we’re ready to expand. Right now, we have another 125 stores we’re operating today that we also need to get right.”
With such dramatic changes already taking place across front and back end operations in less than a year, only time will tell what the next stage of transformation will bring.
This story first appeared in Ragtrader magazine. To subscribe and receive all print stories, click here.