Sportsgirl Case Study

RMIT Centre of Excellence in Entrepreneurship - Entrepreneurship Research Fund Grant case study project.

History

The first Sportsgirl store was opened in 1947 or 1948 in Swanston Street, Melbourne, by the Bardas family manufacturing company. This retail outlet was a ‘hedge’ against their Sportscraft lines being returned or undersold by department stores. When rent on the property was raised in 1956, the year of the Melbourne Olympics, the business was moved to a shop in Collins Street. The Bardas family then purchased this property when it came onto the market in 1959. The judicious acquisition of the prominent site became a significant element in the Bardas family’s retailing and business strategy.

In the early 1960s there was a general downturn in the clothing market throughout Australia. The Bardas family sought to address the problem by instituting a sophisticated strategy of speedy demand-driven manufacturing of Sportsgirl exclusive labels. The production of young local designers such as Prue Acton and Trent Nathan and well-targeted designer label imports were sought out. Initially this was under the management of Peter Corcoran and from 1966 under David Bardas, the 29 year old grandson of the Sportscraft’s founder, Wolff Bardas.

A co-ordinated program of newspaper advertising and merchandising display, innovative in the Australian context, was put into place. This used lively fashion illustration, Melbourne’s best fashion photographers and a young staff of exceptional visual merchandisers led by Hazel Benini from 1963 to 1966 and Hans Brust from 1966 to 1969.

Inspiration came from the dramatic developments in retailing and fashion in England with the establishment of boutiques by young entrepreneurs and designers selling clothing to a young market. Mary Quant’s Bazaar and Barbara Hulanicki’s Biba two well known examples. It was not only the clothing that attracted young consumers to these boutiques but the experience of a new kind of shop. Window displays combined narrative and humour, visual merchandising was playful and experimental and the stores were staffed by young women who played ‘their’ music. Sportsgirl too was developed into a shop that responded to the desire of teenagers and young women of the post war ‘baby boom’ to play and experiment with constantly changing ‘looks’ in an environment that reflected their values.

In America it was the emergence of separates, carefully colour and style co-ordinated lines of tops, pants, jackets and skirts for the youth market that had driven changes to merchandising in department stores. They were encouraged to establish discrete ‘boutique’ sections devoted to manufacturing brands like Bobbie Brooks. By 1963 Sportsgirl adopted the ’colour-blocking’ mode of display for both Sportscraft and other ranges. This entailed the placing of knits, tops, jackets and accessories above or in close proximity to skirts and pants of the same hue that the effective marketing of separates demanded. The strategy was underpinned by Sportsgirl’s existing careful consideration of colour schemes in all visual merchandising. Sportsgirl’s commitment to display rivalled Melbourne’s major department stores. In fact in June 1966,Fashion News reported that a Sportsgirl window had won the major retailing-display industry prize, beating the traditional winner, Melbourne's Myer Emporium.

Linking Sportsgirl’s advertising, store windows and visual merchandising together were the repeated logo in the informal script of the brand name, the motif of the frame and references to Sportsgirl as a young female ‘identity’: 'Sportsgirl is a girl like you', 'Psst, watch Sportsgirl grow!' and 'She’s arrived!' to publicise a new store. The frame appears as a black line over and around images and with the logo repeated to form a frame. The position of the brand name ‘Sportsgirl’ in stark black across the stores’ windows meant that no matter whether the clothing displayed was Sportscraft, Très Camp or Norma Tullo, it was all subsumed under the Sportsgirl brand. The innovative development of Sportsgirl as a brand rather than merely the name of the store, allowed the clustering of diverse goods and services addressed to young women under one roof to take on a logic. Like a film title superimposed over an unfolding narrative, the name Sportsgirl on the window gave meaning to the brand’s extension and proliferation.

The interiors of the four floors of the Sportsgirl store in Collins Street changed constantly throughout the 1960s and 1970s. As new departments were added, new parts of the building were developed. The limitations of the relatively narrow building with its narrow staircases and mezzanines supported its assumed title of ‘big boutique’. In addition to the Sportscraft range, which initially supported the development of other lines, Sportsgirl sold young fashion and accessories, sports and swimwear, bridal, local designer and imported fashion, and included a beauty and a hair salon. The designer label boutique for younger teens established in 1965 was called Top Gear after a successful London boutique. In 1966 a boutique targeted at late teens and twenties called BiGi after Bergdorf Goodman’s stylish boutique was introduced and by 1970 the Magic Mushroom boutique addressed the hippy-influenced and glitter-rock styles for weekend wear. The integration of a health-food café and a travel service in the 1970s consolidated Sportsgirl’s position as a pioneer of lifestyle marketing in Australia.

Details

Related Entries

• Sportsgirl Sportscraft Group (1994 - )

Online Resources

• Adweb, Sportsgirl, Sportsgirl Pty Ltd, 2000. [ Details ]