With the Australian Fashion Industry Awards fast approaching, Ragtrader is taking a daily look inside each category — the finalists, the work behind the entries and the strategy that earned them their place.
Next up: Team of the Year, sponsored by ReStore for Retail, highlighting some of the hardest-working crews across leading fashion brands and retailers. The seven finalists are Akubra, Bonds, Hansen & Gretel, Honey Birdette, Lowes, Sheike and Witchery.
Winners will be revealed at the AFIA Awards Lunch on Thursday 6 August at The Promenade Docklands, Melbourne. Tickets are on sale now.
The AFIAs 2026 are supported by Headline Sponsor The Retail Score, Gold Sponsors Better Packaging and ReStore, Silver Sponsors Apparel21 and Williams Logistics and Bronze Sponsor Afterpay.
Here's the work that got the finalists there in alphabetical order:
Akubra Hats — Heads of Department
At Akubra, there is no digital team and no retail team when it counts — there is one unit. Heads of department across digital, e-commerce, marketing, product development, fulfilment, retail and wholesale run as a single cross-functional group, locked in through weekly trade, planning and campaign meetings that keep every call commercially sharp and operationally realistic.
The past 12 months proved the model. An integrated growth strategy across paid media, email, organic channels and ecommerce optimisation drove strong online revenue growth and a healthier return on ad spend. A new ecommerce website lifted mobile usability, site speed, checkout performance and product storytelling, while Shopify POS rolled out across retail locations to sharpen inventory visibility, reporting accuracy and omnichannel flexibility.
The real test arrived all at once: a website launch, major product releases and a spike in campaign activity colliding mid-transformation. The team held its nerve — cross-functional planning kept inventory, campaign timelines and operational readiness in lockstep, and fulfilment didn't drop service standards through peak trading. The result: a clean launch, strong peak performance, improved conversion and customer experience metrics and a business built to scale. Not one department's win — everyone's.
Bonds — Marketing Team
Be Iconic isn't a slogan at Bonds — it's how the marketing team is built. Thirty people across Melbourne and Bangkok cover brand, social, trade marketing, VM and an in-house studio, while agency partners Special, OMD, Incubeta and Arc Factory hot-desk inside Bonds' own offices. One team, one mantra, no handovers.
Then came the year's biggest swing: launching Bonds into the US. The category was celebrity-led and oversaturated, the brand awareness was zero and the budget was a fraction of the competition's. The team's answer was Made for Down Under — Robert Irwin in a single cinematic one-take film, sharing frame with real snakes, spiders and a crocodile. No CGI. It dropped simultaneously across his channels and the brand's own, and the internet did the rest.
The film generated nine billion earned media impressions in its first 24 hours and $83.4 million in earned media value to date, trending at number two globally on TikTok launch weekend. US awareness went from nothing to 2% in two months. The home front didn't miss a beat either — men's underwear share grew 0.6% year on year from the number one position in a record sales year, while the BONDS Flying Roos SailGP partnership delivered 3.67 billion total media reach, the largest result in SailGP history. Ecommerce grew 10% year on year across three consecutive quarters of brand growth.
Hansen & Gretel
Eleven people run Hansen & Gretel — design, production, wholesale, retail, marketing and digital in one lean, multi-disciplinary team. At that size there is nowhere for creative ambition to hide from commercial reality, and the results show a business where the two pull together.
Ecommerce grew 39% year on year, led by hero style the Stephanie Dress — a new colourway sold out within a week, was recut and went on to move more than 100 units at $649, well above brand average. Wholesale now spans over 50 accounts, with US momentum building from Free People and Nuuly through to Anthropologie. The Tide show at the Museum of Contemporary Art for AFW26 drew more than 30 muses and coverage across Vogue Australia, Harper's Bazaar and Style Magazine. Instagram reached 393,285 views during fashion week, up 45.1%, at 95.1% organic interaction.
But the moment that defined the team came one week before that show, when a factory fire destroyed the entire jewellery collection created for the runway. Nobody panicked. The team sourced alternative materials, adapted designs and worked hand in glove with its manufacturing partner — and a cohesive collection walked the runway on schedule.
Honey Birdette — Australian Retail Team
In late 2023, Honey Birdette's Australian retail operation stood at a crossroads. Turnover was high, culture had lost its thread and the boutique experience had dimmed. Across 37 boutiques united by one purpose — empowering those who want to unapologetically explore their confidence and pleasure — the task was to rebuild from the inside out.
The rebuild was deliberate. Leadership was reset and talent promoted from within, including a Retail Trainer whose eight-year journey from casual to Area Leader became a symbol of what the transformation stood for. New training programs were embedded, the peer-nominated Venus Awards made recognition part of daily culture and the Pillow Talk Survey gave every team member a genuine voice.
That survey now tells the story of a culture restored: 91% enjoy good working relationships, 88% are proud to work at Honey Birdette, 86% strongly believe in the brand's values and 88% plan to stay next year — remarkable in an industry defined by churn. The commercial proof followed. By the end of FY2025 the team had delivered record sales and record trading weeks, beating the entire Australian retail market during its most competitive quarter.
Lowes — M&A Team
Acquisitions like these are supposed to take six months. Lowes did them in a week. A cross-functional team of twelve, led by CIO Sarann Ryan and Head of Schoolwear Matthew Hunt, executed the acquisitions of A Plus Schoolwear in Victoria and Flanagan's in Cessnock across product development, ecommerce, key accounts, IT and on-the-ground operations.
The A Plus deal alone brought 72 schools, nine Victorian stores and more than 26,000 students into the business overnight. Purpose-built mobile RFID thermal printers travelled on site to print, encode and chip every garment in real time — over 90,000 SKUs tagged, valued and transferred in a single week, at a fraction of the $50,000 to $80,000 a traditional stocktake would have cost. When a $400-per-child Victorian government stimulus triggered unprecedented stockpiling, weekly RFID cycle counts powered the predictive modelling that kept purchasing matched to demand.
The commercial upside outran even the operational feat. All 26,000 new customers were introduced to the company's proprietary in-house financing platform, lifting average spend from $110 to $250 per head and adding 26,000 active loyalty members. Flanagan's followed the same playbook faster, and a third NSW acquisition is now in the pipeline — a repeatable growth engine for a business entering its 128th year.
Sheike
Sheike's digital team doesn't do silos. Under Mel Grafton's leadership, e-commerce and digital marketing, CRM, customer care and IT operate as a single customer-first function — and the payoff is written across the business.
Its flagship build is Sheike Society, a custom loyalty ecosystem created to unify the customer across channels and lift repeat purchase behaviour. Within nine months the program had more than doubled its 12-month acquisition target, and members now drive 53% of total business revenue. They purchase 45% more frequently, spend 17% more per order and carry 95% higher lifetime value than non-members. Independent brand sentiment reporting shows a 7% uplift in Sheike being perceived as offering value for money.
Behind the headline program, the optimisation engine never stopped. Recommendation module testing lifted conversion 10.8% and revenue per visitor 10.4%, with mini-cart and shipping threshold refinements adding a further 4.63%. Customer care automation cut first response times to under one minute and average resolution to 11.5 hours — with net promoter scores of 70% online and 80% in store to show for it.
Witchery
Imagine replacing more than 60% of your leadership team and standing up an entirely new buying capability — in the same year, in one of the toughest trade environments retail has seen. That was Witchery's year. For most businesses, change on that scale means holding on and hoping momentum survives.
Witchery grew through it instead. Sell-through kept climbing, profit kept building and new ranges and marketing landed with stronger engagement and conversion than ever before. The reshaped team didn't just bed down — it lifted execution while the ground was still moving.
Chase capabilities accelerated, culture and engagement strengthened and the team came together to sell its Style Authority ranges and keep growing. Handled with the right culture, structural change didn't stall this business. It sharpened it.