Australian fashion brands open more stores, distribution centers in the US

Australian fashion brands told Modern Retail they see huge opportunities in the US, which is larger than Australia and ranks first in global GDP, while Australia is 13th, according to the World Bank. Australian brands have long had an e-commerce presence in the US – Camilla, for example, has had a US website for almost a decade – but more are now looking to brick-and-mortar retail to boost their omnichannel business and connect with fans overseas. Some brands, such as Princess Polly and womenswear brand Outcast Clothing continues to invest in the U.S. market by opening distribution centers across North America to serve its customers.

Supplement to online

Bared Footwear, which podiatrist Anna Baird founded in 2008, has five stores in Australia and opened its first U.S. location this year to complement its growing online sales. Digital sales still make up the lion’s share of Bared Footwear’s business — 70% comes from e-commerce in Australia — but the brand is starting to gain traction with American consumers, Baird told Modern Retail.

Bared Footwear initially hoped to open a store in Los Angeles, but found the perfect spot in Soho, a New York City neighborhood known for its high foot traffic and popularity with tourists. Some of the brand’s employees moved from Melbourne to New York to manage the store, which Baird said was important to maintain the same level of customer service. Still, Baird hasn’t forgotten about California, and hopes Los Angeles will be his next destination.

“We know there is tremendous value in having a physical presence, so we are certainly interested in opening additional locations as we track customer response to the New York store,” she said.

Camilla, an Australian luxury loungewear brand known for its colorful prints and caftans, is also making U.S. retail a bigger part of its growth plans. In addition to its website, Camilla has more than 20 boutiques worldwide and four in the U.S.: two in Florida, one in California and one in New Jersey. Camilla opened its first U.S. store in 2019, and a New Jersey store in February in Short Hills. Camilla is also sold in U.S. department stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman.

For now, Camilla is looking to open stores in areas “where we already have a customer base and where we see potential,” Rebecca Mansergh, Camilla’s chief commercial officer, told Modern Retail. The brand is specifically targeting Florida, Texas, New York, California and Georgia. Camilla will open a new location in Topanga, California, in January 2025. Mansergh declined to provide sales figures for Camilla’s U.S. stores, but said they are “in good shape.”

Princess Polly, meanwhile, opened its first U.S. store in September 2023 at the Century City mall in Los Angeles. In November, Ciaran Long, interim CEO of Princess Polly’s parent company, AKA Brands, said the store had “profitable revenue generation” and a halo effect on Princess Polly’s e-commerce business. In addition, 30% of the store’s customers were new to the brand, Long said. AKA Brands’ U.S. net sales rose 6% year over year in the first quarter ended in March.

Princess Polly doesn’t yet have a store in Australia and is mostly online. But in the U.S., the brand is already working to open three additional stores: one in Scottsdale, Arizona; one in San Diego, California; and one in Boston. These stores will be larger than the Los Angeles store and will be able to carry more merchandise, including accessories.

“We want to… really make sure that we’re able to fully represent our product range and complement an outfit, which we’re really good at doing online,” Courtney Dres, Princess Polly’s director of merchandising, told Modern Retail.

Doubling the distribution

Opening stores is just one part of the equation for international brands looking to enter the U.S. market. In practice, brands also have to make sure they’re prepared to ship products to those stores quickly, restock popular sizes and silhouettes, and adapt products to trends. And doing all that from Australia, thousands of miles away, can be expensive and time-consuming.

With that in mind, more and more Australian brands are opening North American distribution centers to shorten shipping times, cut costs and store local goods. One such brand is Princess Polly. In 2018, Princess Polly opened a U.S. distribution center, and since then the brand has seen “very rapid expansion in the U.S. market,” Dres said. In fact, Princess Polly’s U.S. distribution center now has more inventory than its Gold Coast distribution center in Australia.

Outcast Clothing, a women’s clothing brand founded in 2015, is opening a distribution center in Mexico in October, in time for Black Friday. Unlike Princess Polly, Outcast Clothing does not have a permanent brick-and-mortar store in the U.S. Instead, it serves the U.S. through its U.S. website, which it launched in 2023. Since then, the U.S. has accounted for 70% of Outcast Clothing’s business. The brand has also tripled its total revenue since launching in the U.S.

Currently, shipping from Australia to the U.S. can take four to six days, said Outcast Clothing CEO Lawrence Lees. But a North American distribution center could cut that time to one or two days, he said. “The whole operation is ongoing (in DC),” Lees said. “It’s just getting the inventory over there. Obviously, it’s a huge process. We want to be at least 90 percent efficient.” Outcast Clothing is also considering opening a distribution center in San Diego, California.

Both distribution centers, Lees explained, could help Outcast Clothing realize its U.S. retail ambitions. The brand held a three-day pop-up in Los Angeles in October, and “people were lining up at 3 a.m. every day,” Lees said. “That was our introduction to whether retail was right for us. And we found out it was definitely right.” Outcast Clothing is now considering a pop-up in Miami.

Pop-ups like Outcast Clothing can be a great way for brands to delve into new markets like the U.S., Melissa Gonzalez, CEO of The Lionesque Group and principal at MG2, told Modern Retail. “I think consumer expectations are higher for pop-ups, but they’re still more modified than they would be for a brick-and-mortar store,” she said. “So brands have a lot more room to maneuver.”

Equator equation

There are some nuances when it comes to shopping patterns in the US and Australia. When it is cold in the Northern Hemisphere, it is warm in the Southern Hemisphere and vice versa.

Australian fashion brands are finding different ways to cope with this change. Bared Footwear, for example, has moved its Summer 2025 collection forward to offer it to customers in the US first, alongside the opening of a New York store. “The assortment in the New York store is extensive, and while we don’t have every style in the store, what we don’t have in the store is available online,” Baird said.

Meanwhile, Princess Polly has become “very good at turning seasonality on and off,” Dres explained. “We can pick what’s working in the Southern Hemisphere now and use that as a reference point for what we book in the Northern Hemisphere.”

That way, Dres said, Princess Polly can work on both collections at the same time. For example, Princess Polly finds that lemon yellow does well. So in the northern hemisphere, she uses lemon yellow for summer dresses. In the southern hemisphere, she uses it for cardigans. Red is also a popular color, so Princess Polly uses red for knits in the southern hemisphere and tops and shorts in the northern hemisphere. Leopard print also works well on both sides of the equator.

A few years ago, Dres would have said Australians were quicker to pick up on trends. “We thought our Australian customers were a lot more trend-oriented, whereas it took our US customers maybe a little longer to pick up on new trends,” she said. But that’s no longer the case, she told Modern Retail.

“We can really translate all of our trends into both seasons,” Dres said. “It’s just about making sure the product itself is appropriate for the season… I think that’s a reflection of the strong creative direction of the brand identity that we’ve built.”