50 years of Cue, and Tigerlily’s brand overhaul

Cue’s 50th anniversary finishes with Powerhouse exhibition, and Tigerlily unveils its new brand identity.

Tigerlily is overhauling the brand as it celebrates 20 years in the business.

The festive season is almost upon us, and Buzz has an ear finely attuned to the distant pop of a champagne cork. One beloved Australian brand has an extra case of champagne poised to finish what can be described only as a massive year. Cue has been celebrating its 50th anniversary — no mean feat in this industry — and it has one final treat for followers up its fluted sleeve. On November 29 the exhibition Cue: 50 Years of Australian Fashion opens at the Powerhouse Museum of the Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences in Sydney.

“We’ve been working on the exhibition for almost a year since the initial conversation,” Kate Bielenberg, Cue’s retail brand manager, tells Buzz. MAAS senior curator Roger Leong and assistant curator Kristina Stankovski have trawled the company’s archives and selected 20 full looks as well as photographs, illustrations and ephemera spanning the five decades. Rather than working chronologically, the exhibition is divided into five Cue Codes — themes that have recurred throughout the brand’s history. These include Mod — a nod to founder Rod Levis’s response to visiting London’s Carnaby Street in the mid-1960s; Taking Over This Town, which covers power dressing through the decades and includes some “US gridiron shoulder pads from the 80s through to 90s minimalism and women now embracing femininity again”; and It’s a Cue Celebration — a fitting inclusion of the party dressing that the brand does so well.

“We are also donating some of our garments on display to the Powerhouse’s permanent collection and working with them on building a collection of Cue,” says Bielenberg, adding the exhibition is especially meaningful for Levis, who is still the energetic epicentre of the Cue offices in Sydney. “It’s a lovely way to finish the year that he was awarded his AM. He’s excited about it and incredibly honoured.”

For more, see maas.museum.

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Tigerlily celebrates 20 years next year, and the label has been preparing by taking stock of the past and looking towards the future. The result: a complete overhaul of its brand identity.

“We’ve spent the last 12 months going through the archives and reviewing every collection to get a better understanding of our values and mission,” chief executive Chris Buchanan tells Buzz. “The final piece of that puzzle was to update the logo and brand identity.” This was in part to bring everything in line with the pillars of the company, which he describes as “optimistic, adventurous and ethical”.

“Over the last 20 years, we realised girls don’t come to buy a piece of clothing, they come to buy a piece for their adventures. We help them to make memories.” The “brand audit” has seen the company address everything from its tone of voice, campaign imagery and art direction to that all-important logo.

The brand will open a new store in line with the new identity on December 3 at Melbourne’s Emporium, its fourth store in that city. The launch of the new identity has played out large on Instagram, where the company shocked its 332,000 followers by doing a full wipe of its archive of 4300 images.

In the nine days leading up to Tuesday’s big reveal, it played a daily teaser campaign that averaged 200,000 views a day — “which is up a factor of 10 from (the usual) 20,000”, Buchanan says. “What has surprised us is the positive response. Social media can be a dangerous place at times, but we’ve been absolutely thrilled our customers have come with us on this journey.”

Another part of the journey, which Buzz has previously reported on, is the move towards more sustainable fabrications, which continues as part of this brand overhaul. “We’re moving away from synthetic fabrics towards a more sustainable approach. We’ve been testing new products, new fabrications, linens, silks, organic cottons. Those products are at a higher price point, but the customer has responded well.”

The global market for the brand is 10 per cent, but Buchanan says that given the response from international markets to the improvements in design and fabrications, “we’re forecasting that to become 50 per cent in the next two years”.