Star Spangled Dream

He's worked with a smorgasbord of high-profile celebrities. Now fashion magnate Bruno Schiavi is gearing up for his own big break into 90210, as Assia Benmedjdoub reports.

If Bruno Schiavi wasn't a designer, he'd probably be a formidable investor - even if the Sydney-based entrepreneur doesn't operate by the laws of mathematics.

"I operate on intuition," he says, adding he once walked away from a collaboration with popstar Justin Timberlake because "it just didn't feel right".

But crunch together some figures from his latest shapewear venture, set to officially launch into the United States on October 25, and one would find it hard to disagree that Schiavi is indeed a numbers man.
Starting from the October launch date, 250 SKUs and 11 product lines in two colours and six sizes will land into 860

Sears stores throughout the country. The following day, Schiavi and his shapewear collaborator will appear before 89 million viewers as part of a two-year contract with shopping channel HSB. An additional $US20 million ($A25 million) PR and marketing campaign is expected to draw in some $50 million worth of sales in the first year.
Clearly, Schiavi ain't so bad at arithmetic.

The president of Jupi Corp, a fashion and homewares company which boasts offices in Sydney and the United States, has admittedly had plenty of practice. Since launching his Pocket Sock in 1996 - a nifty device which doubles as a paw warmer and coin purse in one - Schiavi has collaborated with celebrities Delta Goodrem, Jackie O and Priscilla Presley on a range of revenue friendly, mass-market ventures; from lingerie to loungewear to bed linen.  
His latest partner in crime is Dr Robert Rey; a plastic surgeon whose hit reality series Dr 90210 attracts a global audience in excess of 304 million viewers, most of which are women.
A perfect candidate for attracting their target market, says Schiavi. 

"He's a pioneer in his own field. He's told me secrets about where to put the lift in particular garments because that's what he does when he operates. We don't do any lace on the shapewear, it's all smooth lines and a clean cut."

While their initial meeting was more commercial than intuitive - they were introduced through an unnamed company in the US earlier this year - their shared vision and zest quickly impressed department store buyers. In fact, Schiavi said the pair was forced to reject a 500 store offer from Macy's in July after its competitor Sears verbally committed to 860 stores in its first meeting.

"It's really intense because Sears normally take four months to sign you up as a new vendor and they did it for us in two weeks. I can tell you, I'm still pinching myself thinking I've just said no to 500 Macy's stores."

That's not to say Macy's won't get a slice of the action later down the track. Schiavi plans to offer his shapewear line to the American department store, as well as select retailers in Australia and the UK, sometime next year.

"[Declining Macy's] was simply a strategic move in terms of where we saw that our core customer was and in terms of us wanting to launch in October. Macy's is very different in how they work - they have seven different buying divisions so even though we had approval from the top, we had to go to the seven different divisions who then selected which lines they wanted to carry."

Schiavi says this made it difficult for his company, which operates on the grounds of affordability, quality and efficiency.
"I don't understand how a lot of companies around the world give buyers a six month lead time. Our lead times are very short - they're 40 days. We also don't have 50, 60 staff and I think that's where we can keep our prices very, very competitive to everyone else's on the market. I mean, we're going into the US and I can tell you our price points are going to wipe off the competition.

"From $US19.99 to $US39.99 ($A25 to $A50) -  the buyers just couldn't believe our prices," he adds, laughing the memory. "Their mouths just dropped."

And that, Schiavi well understands, is the power of numbers.

By Assia Benmedjdoub