I’m not surprised the DFO shopping Centre group has struck serious financial trouble. The signs were there quite a while ago. It’s all got to do with what i call the misguided morph.
DFO stands for direct factory outlet. That’s how it all started. Factories, and then importers and wholesalers who needed to clear slow-moving or non-moving stock that their regular retail outlets didn’t want to handle, sold it themselves.
They began with a wink-wink nudge-nudge approach to consumers and let them in the back door of the factory on Saturday morning to rummage through the leftovers. Then they made the leftover room into a kind of shop to make the customers more comfortable. Why not set up the shop in a separate location and run it in regular retail hours? Yes!
Predictably, factories were not very good retailers and so when developers like DFO came along offering to establish a whole cluster of factory shops, it seemed like an even better idea.
DFO turned out to be only one of many developers that have offered packaged and promoted retail centres for factories and wholesalers, plus a few retailers who were also suffering indigestion. Soon it was not only surpluses but regular stock being offered.
The developers built their outlet centres in areas that were not exactly prime retail locations but close enough to be virtually as accessible to the car- driving consumer. They also tried to give the centres a frugal feel with rugged architectural features like concrete floors and exposed metal corrugated roofs.
The misguided morph was well under way. The grubby, ill-lit, slightly illicit factory shop duckling had grown into a passable swan.
I recently paid a visit to the DFO at Essendon Airport in Melbourne. Apart from open air parking I was in a regular, sprawling, shopping centre. Certainly there were some factory shops offering bargains but that was accompanied by lots of regular merchandise at regular prices.
The only advantage this place had over a Westfield-type shopping centre was that its land was comparatively cheap, thereby offering cheaper rent – in theory anyway. But you’d have to ask how cheap the rents can be in DFO’s unfinished Melbourne Docklands development.
DFO’s troubles are not all to do with DFO. Like any good idea, ‘me-toos’ have piled in and some of them, like the disaster at Mt Druitt in Sydney, have piled back out again.
Nevertheless there are factory outlet centres now operating all over Australia and there are just too many of them.
Meanwhile, back in regular retail world, we are now seeing continuous clearance sales that cut so deep they rival factory shopping centres on price. Why go to Homebush when there are bargains at Westfield Bondi Junction?
Then there’s the internet, which has hit factory shopping centres hard because people shop online mostly for a price advantage.
DFO is certainly not dead yet and I hope, for Graeme Samuel’s sake at least, that the white knight who has ridden over the hill is carrying enough gold in his saddle bags to set it right.
But that won’t change the factory shop evolution where a misguided morph has turned a moderately good idea into an overcrowded quagmire. Yes, underpants again
I’m still fascinated by the fibres that are being used in men’s underpants. I stopped at the charming Victorian township of Daylesford recently on my way from Sydney to Melbourne by car.
I needed to buy cufflinks. The menswear shop I found also sold underpants. The persuasive sales lady showed me a fine pair made from soy beans.
The feel of them was soft, like bamboo, and you know how I love bamboo.
She only had two pairs left and knocked a few bucks off because the line was being discontinued. The brand was from the US, calling itself 2xist.
I’ve got to say they were the best fitting, best next-to-skin underpants I’d ever put on. And, thankfully, were not hampered by a wretched flusset. The next day I bumped into the sales lady.
“I’m wearing your underpants,” I said with passion, “and I love them.”She stared at me, trying to determine where I’d escaped from before scuttling across the road.
Back in Sydney, I snapped up another four pairs on the net, cleaning out the stock of an online underwear outfit called Down Under Guys Gear (DUGG) but I still lusted after more.
I found the Australian distributor was Hotsprings. It turns out that CEO Wassim Gazal loves soy briefs too and wears them himself. He sadly confirmed they were
being discontinued.
The reason is interesting. It wasn’t price, even though they retailed in the high $20s. Wassim said it was to do with the unavoidability of natural variations in soy yarn colour – which Americans simply do not accept.