Smiggle Smarts

"We’re not about to reproduce anybody else’s success story, we’re making our own. And I think people have picked up on that" she adds. "Now we’re finding people are looking at us and hoping they can replicate the success but it’s very difficult because it’s something we’ve been able to do in-house and bring all our talents together."

Martino believes this is one of the company’s biggest strengths: Smiggle does everything in-house and draws on the multi-skilled team it has on board. "For every aspect of our business, we have the expertise within our own management team so we don’t involve any outside assistance in any way, and, from my point of view, that’s been the success of Smiggle." The in-house team take care of design and development of products, HR, merchandising, marketing and wholesaling. "It’s quite unique and people are quite baffled as to how we cover all the areas."

It is baffling, considering that although the retail stores have about 60 staff, the head office only has a small team of 10. "I guess we’re all multi-skilled," Martino explains. "I’ve been in retail for 30 years, we’ve had Peter’s expertise that we’ve been able to draw on, and Stephen’s merchandising talents and design flair are exceptional." To also help drive the brand further, Peter’s daughter, Jane Pausewang, also joined the business in 2003 as a director and brand manager, with an active role in marketing and advertising.

"The advantage is if we’ve done a window promotion and it doesn’t have quite the strength we anticipated, we can turn a new promotion around in 24 hours, which is something a lot of retailers could never do, and that’s simply because we’ve been able to do it within our own four walls. It’s a huge commitment but as a team we’re very passionate about the product and what we do."

Martino says the Smiggle design and product range are constantly being influenced by its customers. "They’re telling us in some cases what we should be doing and we listen to them. We never force a product on our customer; we’re very much in tune with what our customer is looking for, what price point they wish to pay. They want quality so we offer them that. So our package is simple, yet very successful."

Smiggle stays in-tune with its customers by having a retail strategy that involves educating customers about the business and asking them questions to encourage feedback. "We found that helped us tremendously to sculpture our range and which way we were going to move so that we didn’t leave our true target market behind."

Smiggle’s original target was the 14 to 25 years age group, but Martino says that’s expanded over the years and they now identify their core customers as those aged from 10 to 40 years. "And we’ve designed accordingly," she says. "We’ve made sure that we haven’t lost our original market, which are the young teenage girls, but we’ve given our customer the opportunity to purchase a product that’s good quality, well priced and gives them an identity.

"I guess in the early days we thought if we could get each student’s pocket money we’d be in front, but we’ve done far more than that. Our average sale is now $25 to $28. So that’s an amazing feat given we don’t have expensive products within our stores."

One of Smiggle’s most popular items is its saver packs, which are bundles of products set at different price-points. "We’ve hand-picked each product that goes into the kits, marketed it and we’ve found that’s become a huge part of our daily sales," says Martino. "Over Christmas we amazed ourselves last year, we sold thousands and thousands of just kits. We found a lot of mums and aunties and grandmothers had come in because firstly, the child had requested Smiggle, and secondly, we made the shopping experience hassle-free for them, and our stores are good fun.