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: The Gamechanger Award, honouring landmark initiatives that paved new paths for brands and retailers. The seven finalists are Akubra, Carla Zampatti, City Chic, David Jones, Nehma Vitols, Peter Alexander and Sheike.
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
Akubra faced a structural challenge familiar to heritage retail: demand signals, inventory planning and physical distribution operating in silos. High-intent purchase moments at agricultural shows and rodeos were under-served while growing metro and online audiences went unconverted.
The answer was a demand-driven hybrid distribution ecosystem — ecommerce, pop-up retail, permanent metro expansion and event-based commerce connected into a single feedback loop. Ecommerce performance signals emerging demand, pop-ups act as rapid market validation, metro expansion follows proven demand clusters and major events including the Easter Show and EKKA function as high-intent commercial environments. The business shifted from calendar-based forecasting to responsive, signal-led allocation.
The model contributed to a 35% year-on-year increase in online sales, stronger sell-through across key product lines and improved responsiveness during peak regional demand periods. Metro expansion informed by digital demand improved the productivity of each retail entry, while internal planning moved from static seasonal forecasting to an agile model where allocation decisions follow live performance data. Every new region, event and format now doubles as both a commercial channel and a data source — an advantage that compounds over time.
Carla Zampatti
Australian fashion exports over $7 billion a year — almost twice the size of Australian wine exports — and employs close to 500,000 people, more than three-quarters of them women. Yet despite that performance, the industry has historically received little attention or support from any level of government. Until now.
At the invitation of NSW Arts Minister John Graham, Carla Zampatti CEO Alex Schuman and Edwina McCann developed the first fashion sector strategy in Australia's history. The NSW Fashion Sector Strategy 2025-2028 comprises six priorities, all adopted and now being funded by the NSW Government: a skills and training review, an Australian Fashion Hub for emerging designers and graduates, a smart factory pilot, support for Australian Fashion Week as a global platform, a twice-yearly Paris showroom promoting Australian designers to international buyers and a collection of Australian designers by the Powerhouse museum.
Together the priorities support the entire lifecycle of an Australian designer — from training and early development through establishment at AFW, offshore expansion and finally collection by a public institution. Work is now underway to build support from the Australian Fashion Council, the Federal Government and universities including RMIT, Swinburne and UTS to bring the strategies to life nationally.
City Chic
When US-China tariffs spiked from a historic baseline around 27.5% to an effective 172.5% on China-made product, the standard retail playbook was binary: raise prices sharply or exit. City Chic chose neither. It treated tariffs as a volatility event rather than a pricing event, building a Tariff Shock Playbook to protect cash and preserve the option to scale the US when conditions normalised.
Three integrated moves defined the response. The bulk of US inventory was pulled forward ahead of changes to create a pre-tariff stock buffer. The cost base was reset with around $1.5 million in fixed cost reductions and a 26% cut to fashion options so the US could break even through volatility. And mitigation stayed compliance-led, explicitly avoiding risky origin manipulation.
Management modelled three explicit pathways — pause, price increase or fire sale — with the selected pause plan showing around $6 million in cash release in FY26. When a 90-day reprieve cut additional tariffs from 145% to 30%, the playbook enabled rapid re-entry: $4.4 million of in-origin inventory assessed, $1.7 million identified as low-risk and deployed, delivering $2.1 million in net sales, around $500,000 EBITDA and $300,000 free cash flow in 1H FY26 — plus roughly USD $211,000 in identified duty recovery upside.
David Jones
David Jones Rewards launched in 2025 as a milestone in the retailer's Vision 2025+ transformation — a digitally led loyalty program built on a landmark partnership with Qantas that lets customers earn either David Jones Rewards Points or Qantas Points on their purchases for the first time.
The launch made the brand's history feel new again. A 360-degree campaign reintroduced two of its most iconic codes for a new generation — the Dalmatian, brought to life with AI, and the David Jones jingle, re-recorded by ARIA Award winner Budjerah. The standout moment was The Runway, an exclusive fashion event staged inside Qantas Hangar 96 against a Dreamliner, livestreamed on Instagram and instantly shoppable.
The program delivered more than 410,000 new sign-ups in six months, a 117% uplift in member revenue, a 50% uplift in transaction tag rate, a 19% uplift in member visits and 168% incremental sales uplift versus non-members. The campaign generated 3.9 million press reach across more than 270 articles, $2.8 million in earned media value and 4.5 million social and creator reach. Beyond marketing, the consented data foundation now underpins customer-led merchandising, targeted incentives over blanket discounting and the retailer's Amplify retail media offering.
Nehma Vitols
Australian fashion is heavily concentrated in metropolitan centres, leaving regional communities largely excluded from industry visibility and commercial opportunity — despite strong appreciation for quality and significant discretionary spending power. Vintage 2025 was built to change that, bringing Riverina winemakers in as collaborators and embedding their lived experience into both the garments and the narrative.
The project extended well beyond a collection. A runway presentation, a published 72-page magazine and a broader cultural moment repositioned fashion as a story-led ecosystem rather than a product-led industry — decentralising fashion and proving a regional town can host a culturally significant, commercially viable event.
The runway attracted 200 attendees, a significant turnout for an independent regional presentation, supported by more than 300,000 digital impressions. The limited-run magazine created an additional revenue stream, while post-event coverage including a Much Much Spectrum feature reached an audience of approximately 173,000. Western Riverina Arts identified the project as positioning its creator as a leading fashion practitioner in the region — and the model has since evolved into Citrus Threads, a larger-scale platform with expanded partnerships, multiple designers and a stronger commercial framework.
Peter Alexander
After more than a decade of consistent growth followed by a significant Covid-era sales surge, Peter Alexander faced the question every brand on a hot streak eventually meets: how do you keep growing at pace while keeping customers engaged for the long term? The answer was a retail transformation strategy combining rapid expansion, store optimisation and brand evolution — not a simple race for store numbers.
The store network grew meaningfully across the strategy period, with regional openings in locations such as Albury and Wagga Wagga reaching previously underserved markets. Many top-performing stores had become undersized for the growing range, so the business expanded or relocated a large number of locations — favouring relocation to minimise disruption and missed sales. That unlocked categories like children's and plus-size, previously only available online, for physical stores. Modernised fit-outs kept the playful personality and heritage customers associate with the brand.
The results were immediate and measurable. Expanded stores validated the investment strategy, sales productivity improved across the network, and momentum was successfully maintained beyond the Covid surge — leaving the business with a scalable, more productive retail network with proven regional headroom and larger formats ready for future category expansion.
Sheike
Rather than adopting a templated third-party loyalty platform, Sheike built its own. Sheike Society was architected as a fully custom ecosystem across CEGID, Shopify Plus and Klaviyo, giving the business complete ownership of customer data, program mechanics and future evolution — with CEGID as the single source of truth resolving points, rewards and tier progression across online and retail in real time.
The program tore up fashion loyalty convention. Percentage discounting was replaced with fixed dollar-value rewards, while mechanics rarely seen in the category were introduced — including Status Hold, letting members pause tier progression for up to 12 months without penalty, and LiteCard digital wallet integration for frictionless in-store recognition.
The program surpassed its 12-month acquisition target of 100,000 members within nine months, more than doubling it through entirely voluntary opt-in. Loyalty members deliver a 17% higher average order value and purchase 45% more frequently than non-members. More than a third of members — 37% — now shop both online and in-store versus 27% of non-members, and in-store email capture rates rose 123% post-launch. Wallet users purchase 23% more frequently, and loyalty data now informs trade planning, product launches and investment decisions across the company — a customer program that became core business infrastructure.