Salt 66 surfs into Townsville’s Fairfield Central Shopping Centre
After supporting generations of loyal customers, a Townsville clothing retailer is about to open a new store in Fairfield Central Shopping Centre. Find out more.
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After years of bringing North Queensland the latest and greatest fashion trends, including the present craze for resort sets, popular clothes retailer Salt 66 is expanding to capture a new market at Fairfield Central Shopping Centre.
Founded in Mount Isa in 1950, before expanding into Townsville, GEB Holdings is a multi-generational family enterprise with several iconic Townsville businesses under its umbrella including Discount Jeans, Playtime, and Salt 66.
Salt66’s former-CEO Phillip Beard said it was almost a licence to print money when stocking Australian surf brands like Billabong, Rusty and Quicksilver in the 1990s.
Despite their market domination and iconic “Discount Jeans, how do they do it” advertising, he encountered resistance about including Discount Jeans in a revamped Castletown Shopping Centre in 2000, due to negative associations with the word “discount”.
Looking for a similar word to surf, Mr Beard settled on “salt”, and seized on a trend for using numbers before incorporating it into an American Route 66 Shield for the logo.
“(The rebranding) was almost serendipity in that it wasn’t what we really hoped for at the time, but in hindsight, it was probably not a bad move at all,” Mr Beard said.
“We’ve just been here so long … we’re just about part of the DNA of Townsville’s retail scene.”
Salt 66’s appeal can be traced back to its wide selection of clothing options, for both genders, across a broad age range – where fashion conscious women were the biggest customers.
He said their best selling items were resort sets, which evolved from the pandemic pyjama lounge-wear, transformed into cotton, and then shorts with matching tops featuring Italian prints, where one side was tucked in.
“I think every woman in Townsville’s got three in the cupboard,” he said.
Emboldened by the success they experienced with a pop-up store at Townsville Shopping Centre (formerly Stockland), along with positive feedback he’d received from other retailers, he signed a lease at Fairfield Central Shopping Centre late last year, and will open the new Salt 66 store on Friday.
The Centre’s Manager Cathy Dalton said partnering with Phillip Beard and his long-established brands was an exciting win for Fairfield Central, where Salt 66 would complement their existing retailers.
“The introduction of a unisex line of fashion fills a gap in our retail offer and definitely further cements Fairfield Central as a well-rounded precinct,” Ms Dalton said.
“Salt 66 is geared slightly more toward a younger demographic and will have great synergies with other operators including the increasingly popular Annee’s Caphe Sua Da and the many other long-term retailers who call Fairfield Central home”.
For more information, visit: salt66.com.au
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Originally published as Salt 66 surfs into Townsville’s Fairfield Central Shopping Centre
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