Fraser Live: The in-season wisdom of Dr Quackquack

The emergence of Chickenman as a commentator on the state of the fashion industry has prompted another voice, that of Dr Quackquack. He has a similar background to Chickenman and also wants to remain faceless. That's fine by me.

Dr Quackquack is a more optimistic bird than Chickenman. He says we all need the fighting spirit in these tough times. We must seek marketing solutions by travelling to our customers, asking lots of questions, and listening instead of talking.

He believes women who run their own small retail businesses are an immense source of wisdom, far more than the closeted buyers in department and chain stores who live in a computer-generated virtual world.

The Doctor makes the observation that NSW is currently a tougher state to do business in than, say, Victoria. The expectations that principals have of their agents can be distorted by differences in state-by-state demand – and ability to pay promptly. Because NSW is the dearest state to live in, and money is shorter than it was, clothing is pushed further back in the necessity queue.

Dr Quackquack has plenty to say about fashion fairs too. While he believes Fashion Exposed cannot survive unless manufacturers support it, he estimates exhibiting at a fair will only bring in an average of five per cent additional business.

He argues retailers have only so much open-to-buy and will spend it either at the fair or in the showrooms – but not both. The five per cent extra comes from the euphoria of being at the fair and trying to justify the time and expense of attending.

Another point about Fashion Exposed is that it has become a dumping ground for Chinese imports at silly prices. To the uninitiated, the fair might look like aisles of stands showing next season’s samples when, in fact, many of the sales people are selling in-season stock.

Surry Hills is full of the same stuff. There is no doubt this kind of stock has a strong market but is Fashion Exposed the place to flog it? Dr Quackquack says the organisers of Fashion Exposed should refuse to allow exhibitors to sell in-season stock.

The jobbers’ plot is not a happy one. There used to be a small army of textile jobbers who acted as undertakers when a fashion story had died, leaving behind a dead body of textile stock. Because of the growth of garment imports the undertaking business now needs its own undertakers.

In Sydney, for instance, Paul Fudge (now doing a little better out of mining leases) and Dennis Fox used to process vast quantities of surplus fabric. Some of it found new homes with other manufacturers or finished its life as retail piecegoods. But both those men of the cloth have retired from what became a shrinking business.

Meanwhile, in Melbourne, one of the leading undertakers was Morrie Sunshine. Morrie, now 75, (his father Harry started the business) still comes into work every day but has passed on the management to his son, Dean, who has given his name to the company.

For the record, the business has been running for more than 50 years and is often overlooked as a three-generation Australian textile company with just as much historical importance as the families Wenzel, Parsons, Tinworth or Collins.

The pulse of clothing manufacture can be taken by a look at the jobbing business. I guessed it would be desperately short of  surplus textiles to buy and local manufacturers to sell to. But not so, Dean Sunshine tells me.

Certainly the quantity is down but the quality is up. Dean recently picked up 30,000 metres of Italian wool which he is selling for $15 a metre. He says that Australian manufacturing is more about higher quality and shorter runs, which elevates the jobbing quality but cuts down the big deals.

With China dominating surplus stock supply, Dean knows that eventually there won’t be enough business in jobbing to make a living and has his eye on diversification.

One of his brands, Fabricadabra, deals in fabrics for the hospitality market and fabric shops. It offers regular lines which the company buys in China. For instance, there is a mechanical stretch bottom weight and a satin back shantung in huge ranges of colours.

Not content to rely on textiles, Dean Sunshine is the Australian and New Zealand distributor for a machine that makes what looks like snow. While appearing real, the flakes disappear before they hit the ground because they are actually bubbles.

The latest twist is that the bubbles can now be pumped out in the shape of a company logo (thus coining their name “flogos”) which float about in the air before they go pop.