Australia’s largest family-owned footwear business, Munro Footwear Group, has spent the last 18 years scaling its portfolio by acquiring over a dozen brands. Prior to that, the family built their own. The new thinking was that enough footwear makers were operating in the market by 2008, so why build your own when you can buy one already made?
Since then, the business bought Top End, Midas and Mollini, jumped into e-commerce through Styletread, made its biggest acquisition with Fusion Retail Group (Diana Ferrari, Mathers, Williams and Colorado), and more recently acquired the likes of Zeira, Bobux and Rockport, as well as kids shoe retailer The Trybe and kids shoe brand Roc Boots.
But no matter how experienced one becomes in the art of acquisitions, Munro Footwear Group director and chief product officer Bill Munro says the reality never matches the original plan – especially when buying up distressed businesses.
“The theory behind what needs to be done and the reality can often be very different,” Munro tells Ragtrader. “It's all good and well to do due diligence and look at deals on paper, but it's not until you get under the hood that you go, ‘Oh holy moly, this isn't what we expected…’.
“Every deal that we've done over the journey has not been exactly as we had planned.”
In one example, MFG had saved New Zealand kids' shoe brand Bobux from administration after buying it in 2023.
Munro says the business operations were overly complicated, selling online to more than 40 countries, and shipping stock to five countries for wholesale. There was also an administration function that just didn't work, which they had to overhaul.
But the company already had a New Zealand team established and an office, which seemed like a win to MFG.
“We thought this is going to be great,” Munro said. “What we'll do is we'll use the infrastructure that's in New Zealand to be our launch pad into the New Zealand market. Perfect, made great sense.
“But what we realised pretty quickly was the reality of the people and what we needed to do wasn't going to happen. They just didn't have the right skill set. They didn't have the capability to be able to execute on our plans.
“So we had to completely pivot, and we had to consolidate the business back to Melbourne when that was never our intention when we set out.”
Today, Bobux is a thriving wholesale brand, according to Munro, and is now sold through the likes of The Iconic and Myer, as well as through MFG retailers like Styletread and The Trybe.
Munro says that whenever you do any sort of deal – whether buying a house, opening a cafe, or even buying a business – you have to go in with eyes wide open and a plan with all the best intentions.
“You have to be nimble enough and agile enough to address the situation as it is and be pragmatic about it and say, ‘Okay, that was the plan, and it didn't work. Now what we're going to do?’”
And this advice goes for both buying brands out of administration and buying brands that are generally doing well. Many of the acquisitions made by MFG were of brands or businesses that weren’t in administration.
In 2024, the footwear group acquired The Trybe from retail conglomerate Accent Group for $2.2 million. The Trybe sells a range of kids' footwear and was initially launched by Accent in 2019.
When it was sold to MFG in 2024, the business had 16 stores across Australia. Today, the retailer has up to 18 stores Australia-wide.
Part of the desire to scale the company’s kids' shoe portfolio comes from how demanding the category can be. Kids' feet continue to grow through their school years, with parents having to buy new shoes every year or so to keep pace. However, with that comes a level of price sensitivity, where many parents are finding ways to stretch their dollars.
The other driver is that kids are quite hard on their feet – running around playgrounds, bike riding, etc.
“What we're finding is, given the macroeconomic situation, people are more price conscious than historically what they were,” Munro says. “We're seeing that families with young kids are definitely more sensitive to price, and they're definitely more attracted to product when it's on sale.
"And it's expensive. If you've got two or three kids, it adds up pretty quick.”
General kids' shoes aside, Munro says the big pain point is fashion leather shoes for kids, calling it a difficult category in recent years. Much of this comes from schools joining the office space trend post-COVID and allowing a more casualisation of uniforms.
This has been particularly challenging for Roc Boots, the latest kids' footwear brand to land under the MFG stable. Roc Boots specialises in leather footwear for kids, but has been opting for more hybrid styles that meet school guidelines.
Munro says kids' leather shoes have been a declining market for Roc Boots, while school shoes in general have been quite resilient. However, he is seeing some stabilisation over the last twelve months.
“Albeit there has been some unit decline as the schools are enforcing their uniform policies less,” Munro says. “They're allowing more casualised black shoes as opposed to previously, when it was very much black leather lace-ups.”
Some kids can even wear trainers to school, so long as they are black.
The chief product officer says there will be some tweaks to Roc Boots, but nothing major. This may include a shift in pricing to match the market, and updates in products. Munro is also eyeing international growth. In Australia, the brand has over 300 stockist doors, including Williams, Shoes & Sox and The Athlete’s Foot – the latter being another Accent Group entity.
Globally, Munro says the obvious channel to scale will be wholesale, naming the United Kingdom and the United States as the top contenders. He is teeing up a launch of Roc Boots in UK retailer Office, which manages a range of stores across the region as well as an online platform.
Roc Boots is already stocked at Urban Outfitters in the UK.
As part of the acquisition, MFG did not take on any of the Roc Boots staff, and is simply absorbing the brand and its operations into its own business model housed in Melbourne.
Munro says the brand will need some additional support for its growth ambitions, but because it’s predominantly a wholesale business, the current infrastructure at MFG should support most of the transition.
In the immediate term, Munro says the most exciting facet of MFG’s future is international expansion.
“We've got markets opening up globally in lots of different areas,” he says. “Opportunities are presenting themselves from places that we were not expecting, which is really exciting.
“The Australian economy is not in a great place. Whereas when you talk to lots of other markets internationally, they're a lot more buoyant, a lot more bullish around the future. Whether it be South Korea, Japan, China, or even Norway, they're more bullish about what the future looks like.”