STRATEGIC, nationwide growth focused on exploiting the gaps in competitors’ offerings has been critical to the success of Perth-based ladies fashion retailer, Flower.
STRATEGIC, nationwide growth focused on exploiting the gaps in competitors’ offerings has been critical to the success of Perth-based ladies fashion retailer, Flower.
Local fashion veteran and Flower managing director Chris Hoffman has employed an array of staff training, software systems and management principles to ensure that the 10-year-old private company experienced positive growth.
Mr Hoffman, who started as a department store buyer 30 years ago said Flower currently operated 11 stores in Western Australia, five in Queensland and three in South Australia.
“Our projected turnover next calendar year, once our Sydney stores are open, will be in excess of $20 million per annum,” Mr Hoffman told WA Business News.
He said the company filled a gap in the market servicing female consumers aged between 32-48 who weren’t being accommodated by the department stores’ Miss Shop range (targeting women aged 16-24) or the Ladieswear sections, which younger customers often perceived as a bit “old and uninteresting”.
“There’s very much a gap there (in department stores), and the gap exists also if you look at chains in major shopping centres,” Mr Hoffman said.
Once the company had reached a fairly mature level in the local market after six years, managing the company’s national growth after entering Queensland in 2006 meant relying on the locally tried and tested business model.
“We felt that in expanding the company out of local market it would be intelligent to fine-tune our business model in smaller interstate markets before heading into larger interstate markets of Sydney and Melbourne,” Mr Hoffman said.
“And that’s exactly how it panned out. The business model in Brisbane has been very successful and that’s what we’re looking to recreate in Sydney.”
Mr Hoffman suggested one of Flower’s strengths was its highly organised management infrastructure.
“We have people in the right positions within the head office management team who enable the effective running of company on a day-to-day basis, so in expanding interstate we already have the head office structure in place to manage that expansion,” he said.
Mr Hoffman highlighted the importance of having good reporting systems in place to manage a fast-growing company, in particular a good software system, which was implemented before the interstate expansion in 2005.
“We can get up-to-date, up-to-the-minute sales information about styles that are selling, and we can look at sales results by hour,” he said.
“We have door counters connected to a program that gives us a productivity figure by dividing the door count into the dollars taken for the day, so you can see how effective your sales team have been.”
Mr Hoffman said all of Flower’s expansion was funded by profit.
This has been largely achieved after increasingly moving the manufacturing to China during the past seven years, driven by cost-saving measures, which led to improved margins while keeping the design element in Perth.
Another key element to successful expansion has been staff training.
“We have always held a view that the general level of sales and service in Australia is mediocre at best, and we saw that as an opportunity to have a real competitive advantage,” Mr Hoffman said.
“It strikes us as odd that retail fashion in the Western world, this multi billion dollar juggernaut, nobody spends any money training people in the front line.”
With this in mind, Flower developed a company-wide philosophy and training program and, in turn, a very effective sales team that seeks to understand what customers want through the use of traditional and non-verbal communication methods.
“Once we’d worked it out and written the program, every new person coming into the company was thoroughly trained before setting foot on the sales floor,” Mr Hoffman said.
The success of the Flower brand and its increasing number of stores was due to three things, he said: ensuring consistency of offer for consumers entering Flower from one season to the next; a premium customer service program; and the product itself.
“From July to December last year, our like-for-like growth was 27 per cent across the company and we did that at the time supposedly when the GFC was occurring,” he said.
“If ever we wanted a really significant endorsement of what we were doing from our customers, there it was.”
