Family-owned resortwear label Okanui has notched up around 80 per cent growth in a year as it scales its retail footprint, doubles down on e-commerce and prepares to take its laid-back Australian lifestyle offer offshore, CEO Simon Kasprowicz tells Ragtrader.
Kasprowicz says the brand has been growing by double-digits every year since he took on the CEO role nearly 10 years ago. Founded in 1978 along Sydney’s Northern Beaches by Dick Ash. Nearly 50 years on, the brand is scaling in the direct-to-consumer space, now operating 10 stores across Australia and booming online store.
The brand also has a small wholesale arm, with Kasprowicz saying a third of sales come from online and two-thirds from stores. He says a majority of the growth is coming from online.
“When we took over the business, we came off a small base, and we've been growing anywhere from 40 to 80 per cent every year since then,” Kasprowicz says. “Driving that growth has really just been on the right people, getting the product mix right, and getting in the right systems and procedures.” The latter includes signing on NetSuite, with Kasprowicz and me chatting at the AI software developer’s event this month.
Kasprowicz says Okanui is now ready to target global markets better after onboarding new AI capabilities from the global developer. He says the working approach is to start with direct-to-consumer and then place stock in other countries through wholesale. His top pick is the United States.
Under the old models, Kasprowicz says there was a lot of manual lifting, exporting, extracting data, and converting that into reports. But now, the team is able to use NetSuite to deliver those reporting functions. “I feel the month-end closed reconciliation is a lot easier,” he says.
The onboarding has led to some changes to team dynamics and functions, but Kasprowicz confirms Okanui’s headcount hasn’t been reduced.
“This just allows us to get better and better. With the staff we have, we're starting to promote people internally within our business into new roles, which is something really special to do as a business, and particularly a family-owned business.”
Okanui is about as active as most other fashion businesses in its use of artificial intelligence, but Kasprowicz says the team is on the cusp of moving deeper into it. He says to get all this integrated into one spot and gain agentic analysis out of the data is where the brand will see some strong upside.
This is especially notable in keeping stores stocked.
Kasprowicz says it was quite stressful to keep on top of stock under the old system, especially as the brand scaled its retail footprint.
“We were new in retail,” he says. “We had a couple of stores, and we're trying to refill them. They're telling us that they've got no stock, that the best sellers have sold out, but my data shows they have six of them. We were losing opportunity at the front end.”
To Kasprowicz, this becomes a bit like a circular effect, where it can impact everybody – staff and customers. He adds that changing to the new system is taking time, but the benefits are showing up. With 10 stores across Australia so far, he is also looking to open up stores outside of the country, particularly the US.