No more, please!
Does Australia have enough apparel retailers? Do they offer a virtually infinite variety of styles and prices – from the ridiculously expensive to the hard-to-believe bargains? Are they easy to access without getting your feet muddy or your hair wet?
If the answer to these questions is yes, where the hell is the sense in the arrival in Australia of Zara, H&M, Gap and Banana Republic?
Yes, I know we encourage free enterprise and these new retail brands are iconic in many major overseas markets, but why do they want to shoehorn themselves into an already overcrowded Australian apparel scene?
The madness is not with our market but with these new entrants. We all know how good they are when we visit them in their natural, highly populated habitat and marvel at their inventiveness and the velocity of their throughput. We imagine how exciting it would be to have them in our big cities.
But, in fact, their arrival won’t do a damn thing for our industry. Just the opposite.
First, all the merchandise will be imported, so apart from further clogging of wharves and tributary roads, a rise in retail jobs and some work for shop fit-out companies, our wilting clothing factory scene will not benefit at all.
Second, the presence of these new brands will not increase the public apparel spend, it will only fragment it, and population increases won’t happen fast enough to soak up all this new merchandise.
Third, these new brands won’t buy a skerrick from even our wholesale suppliers. They will use existing overseas sources to supply Australia as an add-on, although how they will juggle northern and southern hemisphere seasonal differences is beyond me.
Fourth, I wonder how well they have done the hard numbers on sales expectations in an already oversupplied market and what happens to the hot items once they cool. In Europe and the US the velocity of stock movement is such that you can put in a factory quantity run and either sell it at full price (repeats are unheard of) or shovel it out at a silly price because you’ve already made your profit. The velocity of our market is snail speed by comparison.
Solly Lew has been holding the Zara licence for years, knowing its potential but held back by the risk. That risk has not gone away. In fact, it has now multiplied with the possibility of the big four all arriving with their trumpets raised.
Quite apart from the delusions of the headstrong and ego-driven foreign retailers, how will their entry affect existing Australian retailers standing in the way? Sportscraft and Country Road will hardly welcome them and neither will the department stores. Even the likes of Supre and the Specialty Fashion Group will have sections of their operations under assault.
Marketing optimists will tell us how competition is good and that the presences of these new retailers will lift everybody’s game. That may be so, but it is going to leave more blood on the retail floor than we’ve seen in a long time.
Hayden flies solo
He’s been around for quite a while and he’s had plenty of managerial jobs in manufacturing and retail but this time Jason Hayden has decided to work for himself.
Trading as On Trend Fashion Services, Hayden is one of the new breed of suppliers who interface between styling choices, overseas factories (mostly in China) and Australian retail groups. While the biggest retail groups are trying to shake off using these captive interface suppliers, (they’re not strictly wholesalers) they still stake their claim to exist through their ability to do better for their retailers than the retailers can do for themselves.
Hayden hopped across the draft board from Physico to S&R to Sport Look before breaking free of employment gravity in early March. He headed overseas and came back armed with enough fresh ideas to pull in some nice orders to be made by his Chinese factory chums.
His customer wish-list is more modest than I’d expected. He doesn’t want the giants but would be happier in the less highly populated store groups where one order won’t drown him.
I visited Hayden just out of his embryo stage. Rather than cooped up in a Surry Hills basement cave, he sat at the end of a vast room above Aphrodite Fashion Solutions in Bourke Road, Alexandria – with rooftop views. He has one Mandarin-speaking employee; everything else, except the occasional personal serving of a chocolate biscuit from a tin in his desk, is contracted out.
“When it is all said and done, this business is about relationships,” he says. “People who like you and trust you will give you a go. If you stuff up they’ll drop you. I’m trying very hard not to stuff up.”