No sacred cows when it comes to turning the fortunes of a business, says Adore Beauty’s CEO
From his family’s deep ties with David Jones to turning around Country Road and General Pants, Sacha Laing reckons he has the right recipe to resurrect Adore Beauty.
It was the unforgettable advertising line from the 1980s and 1990s that is now part of Australian retail folklore: “There’s no other store like David Jones”.
For Sacha Laing, the jingle equally describes his family’s historical attachment to the up-market Australian retailer.
Laing’s grandmother, a seamstress by trade, worked as a dressmaker for the David Jones factory at Surry Hills in Sydney in the 1950s and 1960s for over a decade after emigrating to Australia from China when she was just 19.
Laing’s first wife was also a frontline sales assistant at “DJs” during the ’80s and ’90s.
Laing himself spent 14 years there from 2000 to 2014 and in 2003 met for the first time the retailer’s then celebrity CEO, Mark McInnes, whose advice changed his life.
Laing was group planning manager for womenswear when McInnes asked him to become a merchandise buying manager.
“The main game is in brands. You can continue to call the score for the rest of your life, or you can get in and play the game,” Laing recalls McInnes saying. He took the job and the rest is history.
Laing spent six years as general manager for footwear, women’s accessories and children's wear at DJs before becoming group general manager for fashion and beauty, where he helped transform the business.
He then worked for well-known Australian brands like Country Road, Colette by Colette Hayman and was chief executive of the Smorgon family’s General Pants Co, where he led the turnaround of the business before its sale to Alquemie Group in 2022.
Lessons learned from a master
In October last year Laing was named chief executive of Adore Beauty, an online beauty retailer with two Melbourne stores, co-founded by entrepreneurs Kate Morris and James Height in a garage in Melbourne in 1999.
It was listed on the Australian Stock Exchange in 2020 and has been battling growing pains in the public markets ever since.
Laing won’t comment on his mentor, McInnes’ inglorious exit from David Jones in mid 2010 after a sexual harassment scandal, but says the retail guru taught him many things in business – most notably to have “absolutely fastidious” attention to detail.
“Retail is a combination of art and science, but there’s a lot of science that goes into building great retail businesses, and that comes with detail. Mark was a real believer in investing in relationships internally and externally,” Laing says.
“He knew who he needed to be connected with in order to ensure those brand relationships were thorough. He was also really clear about strategy.
“What Mark did particularly well, and I’ve always believed in this myself and learned from him, is taking everybody on the journey.”
After his time with the Smorgon family the Adore role fulfilled Laing’s ambition to lead a publicly listed business. Like the business General Pants, he sees Adore Beauty as another ripe for growth and transformation.
He says it starts with a loyal customer database of 800,000 annual shoppers.
“We’ve got 85 per cent of our transactions from returning customers, which means we are doing something really right. But we are also doing something wrong, because we are not attracting new customers,” he says.
“It’s the same customers coming back time and time again.”
Adore Beauty’s brand DNA has long been “beauty done better”.
But with the business operating in only 13 per cent of the addressable retail market, Laing sees enormous potential to expand Adore from being purely online to an omni-channel retail model, opening more physical stores to complement the digital presence.
“We’ve got so much data, we know so much about our customer. We’ve got 315 brands and 15,000 products in our business. We’ve got all of the hallmarks of a business that is absolutely poised for significant growth,” he says, adding that he is now “head down, delivering on the strategy”.
“I am out pounding the pavements at shopping centres, finding the right locations for us to open stores while continuing to put the right resources and infrastructure around the business internally for us to evolve into what I think will be a really meaningful omni channel retail business in this market over the few years.”
Moving with the times
Prior to joining David Jones, Laing worked with the photographic film maker Kodak, where he became a qualified printer. He then worked with snackfood giant Smiths before joining DJs.
In 2005, half a decade into his DJs tenure, his marriage broke up.
“I think it is the same whether it be a personal story or a career story,” he says, reflecting on the split.
“If you are working for a business where you don’t want to go to work in that business every day, if you don’t have the conviction and you are not aligned on things, you make a decision to move on. I think that can be hard at times, and I guess that plays out in your personal life as well,”
He has two children from his first marriage.
By 2012, Australian retail had started to undergo a fundamental revolution with brands such as The Iconic and Princess Polly launching on the internet and global brands like Uniqlo opening stores in the local market.
That and Laing’s second marriage to now wife Anna in 2013 provided the impetus to make a career change after 14 years at DJs.
Another of his mentors, Ian Nairn, enticed him to take the position of COO at Country Road Group in Melbourne, which was then owned by Woolworths South Africa. Laing and his new wife bought a house in the up-market suburb of Armadale, where their two boys were born.
Then when Woolworths of South Africa bought David Jones, Nairn tasked him with bringing the Country Road brands into the DJs network. But Laing has always been a Sydney-sider at heart.
He grew up on Sydney’s northern outskirts in Hornsby, where his parents still live to this day in the family home.
“My photos are still up on the wall from school so it is pretty cool that my kids now get to see them,” he jokes.
Upon returning to Sydney to be closer to family and friends in 2018, Laing was hired by the Victor Smorgon Group (VSG) to run General Pants, which the Smorgon family had owned for 22 years.
The former CEO was Phil Staub, whose wife Jackie Vidor is a granddaughter of the late billionaire Smorgon family patriarch, Victor Smorgon.
Laing was tasked by another of Victor Smorgon’s grandchildren and then VSG chief Peter Edwards, with undertaking an end-to-end transformation of the business.
He says he learned plenty from Edwards, but one conversation after a board meeting when the family signed off a complete restock of General Pants’ IT infrastructure stands out.
“He asked me, ‘Sacha, as the CEO, how much time do you spend working in the business, and how much time do you spend working on the business?’,” Laing recalls.
“He then added that ‘Working in the business is Monday trade meetings, the board meeting we just had, it is next year’s budget. I’m thinking, how much time are you spending working where we are going to be in five or 10 years?’ It was a great reminder as a senior leader of what your focus should be on.”
Early in his tenure at General Pants Laing saw first hand the benefit of working for a family business.
In October 2019, after he had completed a strategy reset, he packed up his family for a driving holiday to Byron Bay.
But on the first morning after they arrived, he woke at 5am to a dozen missed calls on his phone: the General Pants head office had been destroyed by a fire.
He and the family returned to Sydney that morning, the holiday suddenly a distant memory.
Weeks later, once the dust had settled in the aftermath of the fire, Laing received a call from Staub: He and Jackie had paid for the Laing family to go on another holiday together.
“There was no question that we were a family business,” Laing says.
Today, retail is very much in the family for the Laings: Anna is a senior buying director for global apparel brand Tommy Hilfiger in Australia and New Zealand.
“So we understand each other’s worlds really well and really enjoy what we do,” Laing says.
“We are both very supportive of each other and believe both of our careers are as important as the other. We lean in on it and on each other when we need to. That is absolutely key.”
Always up for a challenge
At Adore, Laing must now manage multiple stakeholders.
Kate Morris and James Height each control 11.05 per cent of Adore’s register, while Quadrant Private Equity retained a major stake of 32.51 per cent after the 2020 float.
Several private equity firms own 25 per cent, including New York-based investor Woodson Capital Management.
It leaves a limited free float in the public markets, which hasn’t helped the share price. Adore shares have fallen 40 per cent over the past year and over 80 per cent since listing. But Laing insists it is the last thing on his mind.
“We’ve got a really clear plan for the next three years, we can see an enormous opportunity to grow the business and continue to expand margins,” he says.
“When you look at the potential of the business, and you look at the potential relative to peers, we are hugely undervalued.”
Mentors through his career like McInnes, Nairn and Staub have all taught him the key ingredients of a successful retail turnaround.
The first he says, emphasised by Staub, is there are no sacred cows.
“Everything is up for discussion when you need to do drive a turnaround of the business; it has to be end to end otherwise there will be a part of the business that will drag on the transformation journey,” he says.
Ensuring the board and management are aligned and taking the team along with you are the next most important parts of the journey.
Finally, he says, it is fundamentally important to be “constantly checking back in” with the team as CEO.
“Woolworths South Africa do this particularly well with what they call a balanced scorecard. Where you look at the business through the key lenses of performance, working capital and people, so that you are constantly looking at the performance metrics as per where they should be,” he says.
But at the end of the day Laing, who turned 53 in February, lives by a simple mantra.
“If you are going to have a successful career in retail, you have to be deeply competitive by nature,” he says. “My wife thinks the same.”
That spirit has manifested in the recreational adventures of their family, especially their frequent “Bay Runs” of a popular 7km pedestrian and cycling circuit in Sydney’s inner west not far from their home.
“We all ran it on Saturday. Anna did it in 44 minutes and my nine-year-old son and I did it in 48 minutes,” he says.
“For 7km, that was a good effort on my part and that of my young one. But as Anna will remind me, she was four minutes ahead!”
More Coverage
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout