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The Central Pier in Docklands, Melbourne marks a fitting stopover in a 20-month journey.

Inside the vast warehouse-style space of Peninsula A is a network of hallways leading to smaller, private rooms.

It is in one of these rooms that Colleen Callander sits in preparation for Sportsgirl’s spring/summer 2015 parade.

“Do you need any help getting back to the cocktail party?,” she asks after our interview.

I politely decline and spend the next fifteen minutes regretting the decision.

Callander has not only mastered this maze, she has removed similar roadblocks from the business she heads.

Callander moved across to the Sportsgirl brand in December 2013, after six years as CEO of sister retailer Sussan. Since her appointment, the fast fashion chain has become the first company under the Sussan Group, also owner of Suzanne Grae, to pursue a direct sourcing model.

As a fashion retailer tracing its history back to 1948, Sportsgirl can no longer afford the scenic route.

The current vendor base is split between 70% offshore and 30% domestic suppliers.

In a testament to the new direct partnership structure, 28 Chinese vendors have flown in to witness the spring/summer 2015 parade and spend several days working with Sportsgirl at its head office.

Callander has also taken two trips to China this year and admits it has been a complex, six month transition to the new model.

“We’ve cut the agent out of the sourcing model and really, the decision came down to a number of reasons,” she explains.

“One, an amazing girl was available at the time who is a fantastic production manager. I took the opportunity to employ her and a new production team as she really knows the landscape of sourcing. But the big driver is getting speed to market for our customer.

“When you’ve got an agent for a company like Sportsgirl, everything takes twice as long. So just by making those changes, we’ve been able to cut out two to three weeks of our sourcing time and that’s at a minimum. It’s been a very big change within our business and in the long term it’s going to be fantastic for our customer.”

Callander is familiar with the company’s back-end base, having spent nine years at Sportsgirl prior to her move to Sussan.

“What I’ve focused on in my whole 16 years at Sportsgirl and Sussan is these supplier relationships,” she says. “We’ve kept some existing suppliers but we did rationalise the vendor base because we wanted it to be meaningful for both of us. To make sure we were a focus for them and they were a focus for us. Now, we have a combination of existing and new vendors.”

The new sourcing strategy enhanced Sportsgirl’s first margin by +5% points and has improved its ability to compete with fast fashion entrants to Australia such as H&M and Forever 21.

According to the latest findings from Roy Morgan Research, just over 10.5 million Australians buy at least one item of clothing in an average four-week period, from a wide range of retailers spanning specialist fashion boutiques, department stores, sportswear shops, discount outlets and dedicated online retailers.

Among the trendier boutiques (a subset of the 66 fashion boutiques surveyed), H&M is the clear leader, with 143,000 Australians 14+ buying something there in any given four weeks.

It is a close contest for second and third places, with Australian boutique Forever New (108,000) edging out Zara (106,000).

Roy Morgan Research executive Andrew Price says the advantage retailers such as Sportsgirl have is market share.

“While some industry players were concerned that the recent international entries to the Australian market would threaten home-grown businesses, this doesn’t seem to have happened.

“Even with its high volume of customers, H&M currently accounts for just over 1% of total clothing shoppers and 0.6% of market dollar value.

“Australian retailers keen to thrive in this increasingly crowded, globalised market need to be very clear about how their customers approach fashion shopping.

“For example, people who buy clothes at Sportsgirl and Dotti are far more likely than the average Aussie clothes shopper to agree with the statement, “I was born to shop” – with H&M being the only international whose customers come close in this respect.

“These international chains are fairly recent arrivals on the national scene, their interest value is obviously still much stronger than their more familiar local counterparts. Will this change with time? Watch this space.”

Callander is well armed to meet the challenge. Since taking on the position of Sportsgirl chief executive, several internal promotions and entire departments have been created to execute a new, competitive vision.

This includes a new production team, a trend forecaster, print and graphics specialists, two new store design executives, an additional QA and a store planning coordinator.

“The store planning coordinator purely looks at stores every day of the week and allocations,” she says.

“Have they got enough? Have they got too little? Can they sell more dresses? What about transeasonal ranging? That role didn’t exist before. We had a planning team but that particular role is new. I brought it into Sussan a few years ago and we saw amazing growth from that. So I needed to bring that into the business fairly quickly.”

These changes, while structural, have flowed on to the design team.

Earlier in the evening, newly appointed Sportsgirl head of apparel Shalini Ganapathy raced at the chance to present a rack of SG Limited clothing backstage.

The new line is a limited edition collection featuring dressier looks; with on-trend bell sleeves, lace panel midi dresses, knotted skirts, two-piece sets and voluminous silhouettes priced from $89.95 to $169.95.

As she talks through the range, her enthusiasm is palpable.

“The first drop will go to the top stores and with the success of that, we’ll look at growing,” she says. “We talk about the Australian girl, that’s our focus and that’s what we’re excited about. We do casual so well that it was exciting to be able to do a bit of a dressed up range. So we are doing this for October, around spring racing and party time. We think it’s going to be amazing.”

Callander confirms the range will roll out across 41 of Sportsgirl’s 120 stores. While store refurbishments are also a significant part of the brand’s strategy, Callander reveals collaborations as another potential avenue for creative growth.

“We’re talking to a number of people at the moment about collaborations but again, for us, I think we’re in a fortunate position that we can be choosy. Choosing the right collaborations is about choosing how our customer chooses to live her life.”

Callander is already starting to gain recognition outside of the sector for her initiatives, receiving her second nomination in the CEO Magazine’s Executive of the Year Awards in 2015. For now, her focus is capitalising on some of the major changes executed since her appointment.

“I think about the Sussan business and the first 18 months I spent there,” she muses.

“I went through a lot of change and a lot of transition. Year One is about rebuilding your foundations. Year Two is about building on those. Year Three is taking ownership. We’re in Year Two and we’re in a great place. We’re still in the build phase but I think once that rolls out, we’re going to explode.”

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