Cotton On tries on an Iconic third-party arrangement for size

Cotton On boss Peter Johnson is agnostic about the platform used to sell his dresses, T-shirts, yoga pants and shoes.

The Iconic’s Patrick Schmidt, left, with Cotton On chief executive Peter Johnson.

Cotton On boss Peter Johnson is agnostic about the platform used to sell his dresses, T-shirts, yoga pants and shoes: shoppers can go to bricks-and-mortar stores, click online or, from this week, shop via a third-party marketplace.

The days of dragging shoppers to a retailer’s door, whether it is in a shopping centre or online, are quickly fading as consumers flip from mobile phone to laptop and back again in the hunt for the best prices in a new dynamism that ­ignores the old retailing and marketing rules.

It is this trend that has pushed Geelong-based Cotton On to link arms with fashion portal The Iconic. It marks the group’s first third-party wholesale partnership in Australia and, as Mr Johnson explains, it is all about following shoppers and listening to what they want.

“Our aim has always been to follow and provide what our customer is asking for,’’ Mr Johnson said. “We have been focused on that in this market for 25 years through our stores and, in the past five years, through our e-commerce site.

“And we recognise a growing volume of our customers are shopping on a third-party site like The Iconic, so we thought it was perfect timing to jump in with one of the biggest marketplaces in the country.’’

Cotton On has grown rapidly from its base in the Victorian ­regional centre of Geelong to ­operate several retail chain brands such as Cotton On, Cotton On Kids, Factorie, Supre, Rubi and Typo, and has more than 1400 stores across 18 countries. It will offer a curated portfolio of its fashion and footwear goods starting with 650 stockkeeping units live from Cotton On on The Iconic in the first month and rising to about 850 by September.

Mr Johnson told The Australian retail was changing, and for Cotton On it meant changing the way it views its customers and the way they want to shop — rather than the way Cotton On would like them to shop.

“The customer has a number of shops and doors that they are shopping in, and far be it for us to worry about where they are. We used to take a very singular view as retailers for 10 or more years that we had to drag our customer into our shops and that was the only way we could service them and supply them.

“The Iconic is providing a great door for our customers and so we’d be crazy not to want to partner with them to sell our products through that door.”

The Iconic chief executive Patrick Schmidt described Cotton On as one of the greatest fashion success stories in Aust­ralia and a brand that Australians love.

“For us, working with Cotton On is the result of our unwavering mission to deliver our customers the brands they ask for and be a continuous source of inspiration for the latest fashion trends and styles,” he said.

Mr Johnson said sales for the past few months had been flat but profits remained strong because Cotton On continued with its game plan of steering away from discount and promotion-driven sales as other rival retailers have cut prices deeply since the start of winter.

“We have deliberately tried to steer away from heavy discounting. We spent a lot of time developing an offer that doesn’t rely on discounting and that involves ­developing products with a point of difference, elevating the quality of our product, coming up with different reasons to shop Cotton On as opposed to price alone.

“When it is sales time we ­participate like the rest of our competition.

“We are trading up and trading very strong at the ­moment and we trade well during sales periods, but our objective this year has been to balance that out with healthy sales through the non-sales period rather than pulling the discount lever every day.’’