Adam Lloyd is indulging in a numbers game.
While his six-year tenure at Jeanswest has seen it move beyond a price proposition, he has a penchant for quantifying the need for change.
The Australian fashion industry, he says, is at a crossroads.
“The reality is that in the mid eighties, we had a much bigger slice of the retail spend than we do today,” he starts.
“It has gone from about 7.5 per cent to 5.5 per cent. It doesn’t seem like a big amount but I worked it out to be about a $7 billion difference.
“Over the past decade, we have also seen prices drop and if you go back further than that, you can see we don’t get the same retail prices we once used to get for key categories.
“Now you can get a pair of jeans from a discount department store at around $8 and if you’re there at the right time, you will get it for $7.”
Lloyd is setting the scene for August 2009, when he commenced his role as general manager of product for Jeanswest.
Backed by the buying power of parent company Glorious Sun, Jeanswest was operating on a price-driven sourcing model.
Today, it employs a team of over 20 in-house designers who produce 14 concepts per year – and it has the full backing of its China-based owners.
Product ranging has pushed beyond men’s and women’s fashion with category extensions across accessories, active, denim, maternity and more.
Lloyd admits there weren’t any designers in the business five years ago. Change has become a matter of survival.
“The Australian market has its idiosyncratic needs and we needed a way to be able to cater for that.
“In recent times, we have seen a lot of international retailers on our shores and they are taking a slice of the action.
“We are blessed by the fact we are in the southern hemisphere because we can watch the northern hemisphere.
“What are they doing? What are they doing well? What are they not doing it well? Then, we bring it to our shores six months later.
“It’s a double edged sword though because in many ways, perhaps we haven’t pushed the design element and the innovation as much as we could and focussed on how we can buy things more cheaply from Asia.”
It is this refusal to play the price card that has reinvigorated Jeanswest.
Four years ago, the retailer launched a pre-Christmas window campaign framed around a $49.95 dress.
The value dress proposition was $20 to $30 less than regular prices.
“It was hugely successful and in our third year, the numbers starting to get pretty serious,” Lloyd explains.
“We noticed on that third year, one of our competitors came out with a dress window for $49.95 in the same week we did.
“So we started thinking that we’re going to have to evolve this.”
Instead of deflating the price, Lloyd and his team of designers moved upwards. A new window program was released with a sand-washed, digitally printed silk dress at $129.
The idea was framed around creating the perfect dress instead of the perfect price.
“What were the results?,” Lloyd questions. “We actually made more money on that window than we did the previous year after three years of successive growth.
“We sold a lot less because our prices were a lot higher, so it was a lot less work for our staff and supply chain but we made more money.”
This was not to be the first and last gamble for Jeanswest.
Earlier this year, the retailer introduced its first luxury denim line ‘Prima Denim’, produced using premium fabrications from Turkey and washing ingredients from Italy.
Priced from $129 and released in mid-March, the line resulted in 80% sell through after just three weeks. This was despite an estimated three month supply of product.
“So not only did we make what we felt was the best jeans we possibly could, but it actually had the biggest commercial success of anything we’ve ever done in denim,” Lloyd says.
“The key was that we weren’t driven by result, we were driven by the right product and the result followed.”
These injection ranges, paired with the bread and butter product, has seen Jeanswest experience 30% growth in the past four years and 62% in womenswear.
In order to foster this, the retailer is starting to invest in upskilling its workforce.
Last year, Jeanswest launched a program in conjunection with the Textile & Fashion Hub in Melbourne to put its entire product team through a technical course.
This included knit and woven components as well as specialist skills. The program is entirely bespoke to the Jeanswest business and focussed on core categories such as denim.
“It was about bringing, I suppose, those that needed a lot of work up to a certain standard and then working with some of the more specialist ones to try and take them even further,” Lloyd says.
“Can I tell you, it was incredibly hard to find really strong denim technicians that could actually take the course.
“We had ended up having to fly people around the country and bring them to Melbourne.”
Jeanswest has even started reinvesting in local manufacturing. This year, a graphics t-shirt line was produced using locally sourced cotton, jersey, production and fabric printing services.
Lloyd says the venture was surprisingly cost effective with just a 10 to 15% premium on existing manufacturing costs.
It is one of many ways the company will continue to experiment with lines and ventures that excite its customers.
“We’re on a journey, we’re going to continue with this,” he says.
"We’re certainly not exactly where we want to be and we’re going to take this further. But as a brand, we now stand in the marketplace as our own entity and as our own identity.”