Fraser Live: Fashion better than fress

My retail space consultant friend, Lawrence Brown, says he’d rather be retailing schmuttas than fress (food) in Australia at the moment.

Overall, fashion is doing pretty well, typified by the sprouting of Witchery stand-alone concept shops. The latest Witchery recently opened in Westfield Bondi Junction, which Uncle Frank has turned into the busiest shopping centre in Australia.

Lawrence does a lot of overseas travel and now rates H&M as the hot fashion chain in the world and certainly better than Zara. But he doubts either will come here because we simply don’t have the population to support that type of high throughput operation.

Lawrence is going retail himself, incidentally. He is about to open the first chocolate café in China – along the lines of Max Brenner, but with better chocolate, he says. An Australian chocolatier has provided John Brown Chocolates (the name of the café) with delicious recipes, according to Lawrence.

If the Chinese go the way of the west with an obsession with chocolate, we won’t see Lawrence flogging retail space much in the future. I used to get updates from Lawrence on the proliferation of factory shop centres but that dance card is virtually full. There is a limit to the amount of pretend-wholesale outlets our population can support.

However, Lawrence is enthusiastic about the re-vamping of Sydney’s Birkenhead Point. Up until recently it didn’t seem to have any particular retail direction, but now it is reinventing itself as a factory shop bargain centre.

I must warn you about the law at this point. Unless applied to shopping precincts specifically called “direct factory outlet” or “DFO” you are in breach of copyright, because those names are registered and fiercely defended when used as a generic description. I should know. I got a stern warning when I fell into the generic trap a year or so ago.

Back to Birkenhead, where the quaint maritime-type buildings are being redeveloped into a cohesive shopping centre, the leasing people are trying to attract factory shops and are doing quite well at it, with some good names like Calvin Klein jeans on the menu. 

But there is a dilemma faced by all such marketing strategies. There is a divide between regular retailers opening a shop to clear their excess stock and uncrackable nuts, and factories or importers who want to clear leftovers, samples and returns.

While the public loves to be let into the warehouse, there is not the same enthusiasm for a familiar shop brand dropping its pants. I’m not talking about price or value here, but perception. Any stock outlet centre is better off advertising apparel brand bargains rather than retail name bargains.

That, of course, is not easy to do. If David Jones, for example, wanted to take space to move its lemons, would  a bargain centre have the balls to knock it back? Difficult whichever way you go.

Birkenhead has a great opportunity to develop a business like Harbour Town on the Queensland Gold Coast, now targeted by visitors rather than drifters just dropping in. Harbour Town has expanded mightily since it was first opened, showing that if the mix and the promotion is right the crowd will come.

Birkenhead has the right ingredients: a little quirky, sitting on the harbour, no competitors close by and adequate car parking – for the time being, anyway.

Henry’s cover-up

Now that the Billy Connolly-sounding Henry Benjamin has given up making garments in favour of being a textile agent, he’s prepared to enrich the lives of his former competitors by giving away some of his secrets to success.

Secret number one is what to do when garments are returned and are sitting staring at you accusingly from the receiving dock. You know very well that if a buyer comes in looking for specials, the smell of distress will waft towards her and she’ll offer you five dollars each for the 200 dresses.

The way to avoid this is to throw a cover over the racks of returned stock. The rampaging buyer will ask what’s under the cover, whereupon you will say that they are hot-selling, keenly priced dresses awaiting the arrival of a cheque before dispatch. The buyer will offer to pay immediately if she can have them.

A variation of this strategy is to hide the dresses altogether and show only a swatch of fabric and a sample in a different colour, with the story that this hot seller is about to go into urgent repeat production and that the buyer could add a couple of hundred onto the end of the order if she’s quick. She is quick. She places the order and you dispatch the hidden stock three weeks later.

Henry agrees that these tactics may not always work but, with shoulders raised, he says “at least its wurrth a try”.