Fashion giant Decjuba plots Asia expansion, led by Tania Austin
One of the most successful female fashion brands in Australia is making its first move into Asia and expanding into menswear and beauty products.
One of the most successful female fashion brands in Australia is making its first move into Asia and expanding into menswear and beauty products – the next steps in the evolution of rich-lister Tania Austin’s highly profitable Decjuba group.
Decjuba is working on plans to expand into the Singapore market later next year, its first bricks and mortar store in Asia, after its international e-commerce operation has grown in recent years to now represent 20 per cent of total sales.
“We continue to look around the world and we don’t see another brand doing what we are doing as well as we do it,” Ms Austin, Decjuba’s founder and chief executive, said in a wide-ranging interview with The Australian to mark the firm’s 15th birthday.
“I thought for a long time we didn’t need to have physical stores abroad. But every time I go into a good shopping centre I’m like, ‘It is that experience piece that we are seeing consumers come back to.’ They enjoy it. There’s definitely a demand for it.”
Ms Austin and key members of her executive team visited Singapore and London in August and she said opening a Decjuba store in the former city no earlier than late 2024 was currently the “No.1 focus” for the group’s Asian expansion strategy.
Ms Austin built fast-fashion behemoth Cotton On with former husband Nigel Austin before they separated in 2008.
With the sale proceeds for her stake in Cotton On she bought five women’s fashion stores under the Decjuba (pronounced De-Cuba) banner.
Over the past decade and a half she has grown the brand, which sells casual women’s clothing, to 140 stores across Australia and New Zealand.
She has also created two new brands under the Decjuba banner, Decjuba Kids and D-LUXE Basics.
The latter, founded in 2017 and until now only available online and in selected Decjuba stores, will this month be sold in eight new D-LUXE concept stores that will feature a new extended range, look and feel for the brand.
These stores will open in Geelong in Victoria, Rundle Mall in Adelaide, Eastland and East Gardens in Sydney, Pacific Fair in Brisbane and Subiaco and Joondalup in Perth.
Separately Decjuba has partnered with Mr Simple, a homegrown menswear label from Melbourne started by entrepreneur David Fraser in 2007, to offer its first menswear products. They will be available online and in 15 of Decjuba’s larger stores. A pop-up store will be initially launched at Melbourne’s Southland shopping centre next month.
“We have co-designed the range and we see it mirroring what we are doing in the D-LUXE range,” Ms Austin said.
“This is definitely part of our growth journey. But menswear will always be tight for us. We want to offer the basics that men are grabbing all the time, that they need to wardrobe-build.”
Next month Decjuba will also launch Decjuba Beauty, its first beauty products range offering 34 items focusing on beauty essentials for lips, nails, cheeks and eyes. Each of Decjuba’s 140 stores will carry the range.
Ms Austin said it had taken 12 months to develop, working with an Australian supplier for some of the items.
“We are not a beauty retailer or a skin retailer. So this is really about the Grab and Go handbag essentials that you are popping in as an extension of the Decjuba brand. What do you expect from to Decjuba? You expect quality, you expect timelessness, you expect it to be amazing,” Ms Austin said.
She said much of Decjuba’s growth was coming from increasing the size of its store footprints from 240sq m to at least 350sq m. One store planned to open next year will be 400sq m.
She said trading for the group had softened this year.
“But last year we were in the post-lockdown climate. Trade is solid but we aren’t seeing any massive like-for-like growth. We are not surprised about that. We aren’t expecting change overnight,” she said.
“We are definitely seeing improvement. We are feeling quietly optimistic. Our biggest frustration is getting leases done. We know the value of our brand what it brings to shopping centres.”
Decjuba is currently finalising construction of its new head office at Cremorne in inner-city Melbourne, which is slated to open early next year. The five-level building has 5 Green Star certification and will house Decjuba’s 185 head office staff.
In August the group held its third annual recruitment day, where it hired 300 casual staff for the summer sales period.
Ms Austin said 80 per cent of those staff were likely to be retained by the business. “I’m very passionate about learning and development and about retail as a career. For a long time, retail hasn’t been seen as a career. We are really passionate about ensuring that there is really clear career paths and journeys for anyone joining Decjuba,” she said.
“The most cited reasons people tell us they want to work at Decjuba are ‘We’re really interested in your story, we want to work for a woman and we love that you guys give back through the Decjuba Foundation’. So it’s really, really powerful.”
Ms Austin has contributed at least $10m to the Decjuba philanthropic Foundation over the past 15 years.
This includes the Foundation’s largest investment with Australia’s leading digital-led mental health not-for-profit Smiling Mind, with its app downloaded nearly eight million times.
“The Foundation’s goal is to positively impact 25 million lives by 2025. We are now at about 13.8 million lives and we’ve got really good auditing and we capture the data really well. It’s really important to me that we can stand behind everything that we are saying. We are now going to have to come up with a new goal when we hit our 25 million goal.”
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