Kookai global branding officer Bianca Vagner-Cromb reveals what it takes to stay on top.
My parents founded Kookai the year I was born. 1992. So in a way, I’ve actually grown up with the brand and it’s been a huge part of my life.
My parents never expected my brother and I to be involved with the company. They actually thought we would do the opposite and choose a different career path and not be involved in the family business.
They were very happy when I came to them at 18 and expressed my interest in working within the family business, however they really wanted me to work my way up from the store floor, which I’m glad I did because I think it was the best thing for my career.
At 18, I started on the shop floor and moved into head office when I was about 21.
I knew I always wanted to be in the marketing department as I was always so interested by what the team did: I loved seeing the campaigns come together, the themes of the runway shows, the models, the photo shoots and everything in between.
I’ve worked my way up from being a sales assistant to my role today as global branding officer.
I don’t think I realised then how much working on the shop floor and interacting with customers would help me in my role today.
I have such a strong understanding of who our customer is, what they want and when they want it and it’s really benefitted how I do my job.
I know how to market to our customer because I do have such a great understanding of who they are and what they want to see from the brand.
I was always concerned (and I sometimes still am) that people might have thought I was only in my role because of my parents.
But I think this actually benefitted my work ethic because I’ve always worked incredibly hard to ensure that people don’t perceive me in a certain way.
One of my first roles in the office was assisting in allocations, very suddenly the girl who I was assisting moved back overseas and I was thrown into her role.
It was a lot of responsibility to be in charge of allocations for about 40 stores at the age of 21, without a huge amount of experience or knowledge of the software but it was a great way to learn the role.
Coming into the marketing department, I also didn’t have any marketing experience.
I studied communication design at university which definitely helped me in some parts of my role, but I really had to step up and learn everything on the job.
I guess not having any prior knowledge or experience was definitely challenging and a little daunting at times but it also was a great way to learn.
A huge milestone for us as a business was acquiring the global business in 2017. Almost overnight, the business expanded to include a second head office in Paris, over 200 retail outlets throughout Europe and distributors across more corners of the globe.
As Kookai was being run by a group in Paris for so long before we acquired the global business, the brand is so different across Paris and Australia in all facets of the business.
A huge part of my role and the other global executives is bridging the gap between Australia and Paris. I’ve gone from being very Australian focused to now having to think about everything we do from a global point of view in order to unify the brand.
The Australian and French markets are so different, so it can be quite challenging to think about every decision from a global perspective but it’s been a great learning curve for myself and the team in Australia.
Over the last few years our collection has really matured and changed a lot from what it used to be when Kookai began.
We were very well known as a brand for having incredible basics which was really the core of the Kookai collection and what our customer came to us for, but over the last five years our fashion has really changed and taken over our basics collection, and I think now the brand has grown and matured with our customer.
Because of this, our buyers have started buying much higher in our fashion styles than basics as our fashion is flying out the door which has been an incredible change to see.
We are quite different to other brands in that we always have that element of ‘newness’ with our weekly drops into store as opposed to dropping an entire collection at one time.
Our customer loves this element to our business as they know they can pop into store every week and expect 50-60 new styles and colourways.
Our product has always been produced in our own factory in Fiji. Dad was the first retail manufacturer in Fiji and he loved the idea of being able to provide more job opportunities for Fijians and giving back to his community.
After Fiji was hit by Cyclone Winston and our factory was affected in 2016, we realised this ran a real risk to our business and made the decision to open up another factory in Sri Lanka three years ago.
Dad was always very keen to own our own manufacturing facilities to ensure we could have oversight and transparency into the working environment of those who produce our garments.
We now employ just under 1000 Fijians and just under 600 Sri Lankan residents in our factories and we are constantly expanding our factories due to the ever-expanding collection.
In addition to investing heavily in training and upskilling our Fijian staff members, we also offer university scholarships to their children as part of our overall commitment to the prosperity of the Fijian people.
Because our manufacturing is vertically integrated, it allows us to be very reactive with making changes based on sales which I think is a huge strength of Kookai.
Our product is produced during the week, shipped from Fiji and Sri Lanka on Friday and arrives in stores across Australia and New Zealand by Monday.
At the moment, we have head designers in Australia and in France, so the ranges and designs are quite different to each other.
One of the big challenges we face as a company is the seasonality difference between Australia and Europe, which is why we continue to have two different collections, however we are working on ways we can align the collections.
We have started incorporating styles from each other’s collection which has actually been quite successful in both regions.
A lot of France’s best-sellers this season have come from Australia and it’s been so interesting to see how the Australian product is received by the French market and what does and doesn’t work for them.
We’ve also started manufacturing part of France’s collection in our Sri Lankan factory which has seen an improvement in the quality of the product in France.
There will be a lot of changes in the company to unify the brand globally, both internally and externally.
We are aligning France with our business platform and refining our technology platforms, logistics, sourcing, branding and buying to align with the Australian system, which does come with a lot of challenges.
Aligning the collection across both regions will be a big change for France, as they’re currently targeting an older customer than we do in Australia, so it will be interesting to see how these changes are received by their current customer and how we acquire a new, younger customer in France that is more suited to our global collection.
The key challenge right now is definitely balancing both Australia and France and understanding both markets to ensure everything we do is right for the global business.
I am incredibly proud of my parents and how hard they have worked to build such an amazing business with such an incredible culture.
There have been a lot of ups and downs over the last 27 years that they’ve run the business but they have continued to stay true to themselves and kept Kookai as a family owned business which I think is a really important aspect of the brand for all of our employees.
I am constantly proud and blown away by everything that they have done for my family, our employees and our business and they are really the best mentors I could have asked for.