Alice McCall courts China with dedicated e-commerce platform

The Australian designer is tapping into the hunger for her ultra-feminine styles among Chinese consumers.

The Australian designer is tapping into the hunger for her ultra-feminine styles among Chinese consumers. Picture: Jane Dempster/The Australian.

Australian beef and barley may be off the menu in China but our fashion industry is hoping the market has a growing appetite for its wares.

Designer Alice McCall launches her Chinese e-commerce site this week, hoping to tap into fans of her “princess” styles.

It follows a drop in Chinese tourism to Australia because of last summer’s bushfires and then COVID-19.

“We know there’s a big Chinese consumer base for our brand,” Ms McCall told The Australian.

“We had a decline in sales on lace pieces and Chantilly playsuits in and around the time of the fires, and it was just understanding where those sales went, and a big part of it was the Chinese tourists not coming to Australia.”

Ms McCall has been investigating the market closely for years because of the appetite in China for her ultra-feminine styles.

In 2016 she went into a franchise deal with a local retail partner, opening a stand-alone store in Dalian, northeast China, thereby becoming the first Australian designer to do so.

“Although the store isn’t open any more, there were many positive key learnings from this experience of opening the brand’s first store in the Chinese market,” Ms McCall said.

“It really allowed us to understand the brand’s potential growth opportunities in China and the fact that a retailer was wanting to open up a stand-alone Alice McCall store just showed the strength of the brand within that market.”

Around this time Ms McCall also took out the trademark for her brand for China, something that often hinders brands when their names are trademarked by others in the market.

Ms McCall said they “get copied quite a lot in China and have for the past decade or so — there lies opportunity”.

The e-commerce platform will be housed on WeChat, which will also house the brand’s social media profile. The brand also will be active on the Chinese social media platforms Weibo and Little Red Book.

Currently, 20 per cent of the brand’s wholesale accounts are based in China, making it the second biggest international market after the US.

Ms McCall said she was unable to comment on the current trade tensions between Australia and China that had hit the beef, barley and wine industries.

“There is definitely opportunity there (for Australian labels). There’s still that rising affluent middle class in China and the romanticism around Australian brands,” she said.

Alice McCall is not the only fashion company focused on China.

Last month e-commerce player Showroom-X launched with a stable of top-tier Australian and New Zealand fashion and lifestyle brands, and its sights are set specifically on the Chinese consumer — first in Australia and then in China.

Its website has site-wide Chinese translation integration and is promoted via WeChat.

Co-founder Richard Poulson has been working with Chinese entry strategists for 18 months.

“The key learnings are that to successfully enter China you must be authentic, have a story to tell and court your local Chinese communities before entering the market,” Mr Poulson told The Australian.

For Ms McCall, who already has history in the market, having a direct e-commerce channel with the Chinese market is just one more step towards larger goals in the country, including finding local warehousing options.

“We want to test the market a little bit for probably about six months then we’ll look at going with a Chinese-based partner,” she said.