The womenswear brand, designed by Alexandra and Genevieve Smart, will unleash ‘Lounge’ in stores from April/May. The new collection is separate to Ginger & Smart's mainline and will be an ongoing category for the nine-year-old label.
“Our tag line for Lounge really is 'It's for that other part of your day', that part of your day when you're travelling, relaxing, yoga, friends, coffee, picking up the kids,” Alexandra Smart said. “The colour palette still merchandises beautifully back with mainline but the colours are more muted, it's a little bit darker, a little bit more edgy and we've taken a lot of structure out of the pieces.”
The designers' hope is that Lounge will grow to represent “20 to 30 per cent of revenue”.
“The key goal is to introduce that part of our collection that has always been there but has been a bit overlooked, to just bring it to people's attention that we do this level of product and we do it really well,” Smart said. “The second goal is to offer a deeper, wider variety of product in our own stores because that is what people have been asking us for. Wholesale customers and our retail customers have been asking for this more casual area.”
Lounge's retail price points will sit 30 per cent below Ginger & Smart's ready-to-wear mainline, with dresses retailing on average between $299 to $350, pants at $299 and tops at $169. The collection will be manufactured onshore and feature silks, organic cotton, jersey and tencel.
The product will land in stores at the transeasonal times of April/May and November/December and will not be discounted. As for retail, Ginger & Smart closed up its 'Ivy' boutique on Sydney's George Street at the beginning of March 2011, with a replacement 55 sqm store to open within Westfield's Sydney CBD complex on March 15.
“What I hope for the Westfield Sydney store is that we attract a new customer, a customer that perhaps we haven't been there for in the past,” Smart said. “In the current retail environment, you've really got to be where people want to shop. I think Westfield does that really well. When you look at the calibre of the international retailers that are in that centre, it's really offering something very, very different to the consumer.”
The store has been designed by Make Creative and will add to Ginger & Smart's boutiques in Sydney's Paddington and Avalon. Other stockists of the label include Venus & Mars (Vic), Miss Ruby (Qld), Harry & Gretel (WA), Zeitgeist (Tas) and department store David Jones.
Erin O'Loughlin