Precious few riches in the rag trade
It’s tough, and not many people would encourage it as a career path, but those in the middle of it wouldn’t do anything else. This is fashion, darling. Audrey Malone reports.
When Sophie Brader moved home to Timaru from Melbourne to take on the family business, she had to talk her parents into it being a good idea.
She had a high-flying career in industrial design, but she wanted to be the thirdgeneration owner of a few fashion stores. ‘‘Fashion’s a hard game. Retail is tough. Let’s put it like this – my dad did not encourage me to come home at all,’’ she says.
Brader has short, blonde hair, a bubbly personality, and a steely determination. You need that in the retail game – it’s hard going. She is now the partowner, alongside her parents, of several stores in Timaru, O¯ amaru, and Ashburton: Miss Timaru, Preen, and Todd’s of Ashburton. The number and breadth of the stores have expanded in the five years she has been on board. With it comes a lot of risk. If a supplier she uses has a bad season, then she has a range of stock that doesn’t sell. She can get a new supplier, but that means a loss to her company for the range that was dead in the water. There’s no two ways about it: fashion is tough going.
Although fashion is a $5.3 billion industry in New Zealand, it’s ultra-competitive, and based on crystal ball-gazing: you have to predict what people are going to like or want in a year’s time. That means if you get it wrong, you are yesterday’s news. Domestic producers and retail stores are also competing with a global market. With the internet, and the rise of multinational fashion stores, the Kiwi market can struggle to get the oxygen required to survive.
The past year has seen the loss of Kimberleys, Topshop, Topman, David Lawrence, Marcs, and Andrea Moore. New Zealand is a small island nation, isolated from a lot of the world. Any fashion producers or retailers have expensive operating costs, relatively smallscale operations, and have to pay 15 per cent GST and a further 10 per cent duty to the government. That makes it hard to compete with the likes of multinational company Zara, which falls under the Inditex retail stores umbrella. Inditex has extended its tentacles across six continents. It produces
248 million garments each year, which then get shipped to 6500 stores in 88 markets. Global brands are producing 52 micro collections a year, on averages one a week, creating high turnover and constant fresh product for consumers. Globally, people are spending about $200b on fashion each year, going towards buying any one of the 80b garments made. Making garments has become cheaper, and Sustain Your Style, a group advocating for ethical dressing, says people have five times more clothes in their wardrobes than their grandparents did, and on average wear each one about seven times before getting rid of it.
All of these things are reducing the number of jobs in New Zealand fashion, and the earning potential for those in the business. Most of the jobs in the local industry are not glamorous, and you don’t earn much. If you push above that, there’s always the looming axe if you don’t predict correctly what people are going to want, or the overseas competition with the lower dollar is too great.
While the country kicked up a stink about World using cut-price T-shirts made in Bangladesh and embellishments bought off Chinese mega-retailer Ali Express and labelling the items as being made in New Zealand, local consumers don’t want to pay the high prices for locally made goods all the time, Brader says – so she offers a variety of stock in store.
Brader pursued fashion because she loves it, but also because she sees potential for growth. That excites the business side of her.
‘‘It’s all about how you approach it,’’ she says.
She has put an emphasis on social media as a way for customers to engage, and for them to see clothes.
To highlight the stores’ products she uses her staff and people from the wider community.
She has launched a Facebook page called Preen Sisters Styling, where women can post photos about outfits they are putting together, ask each other for tips, and talk about all things fashion.
‘‘Our suppliers give us these lovely photos with these beautiful 6ft models. No-one looks like that, and they can’t relate,’’ Brader says. ‘‘I want my customers to see the clothes on real women, so they can imagine themselves in the clothes.’’ The designer ‘‘Growing up, I was into mud, dinosaurs and bugs,’’ Tess Norquay says. ‘‘So, it was a natural progression into fashion,’’ she deadpans.
Norquay shows up with strong eyebrows, bright pink lips, a heap of dark brown hair piled on her head, and ready to laugh.
Her layers of clothes for the blustery Wellington weather look so cool it hurts. She could