Catch Group group head of marketing Ryan Gracie discusses the Catch Group's acquisition of Pumpkin Patch and how they plan to bring back the iconic childrensware brand.
What did Catch Group see as the biggest issues with the brand when you brought Pumpkin Patch on?
They probably had overextended themselves in trying to be too much to too many people by going into young teens, getting away from the heritage of the brand where it was more around baby and nursery, they probably just overreached, I think.
They also extended themselves around the world, it's very hard to manage logistically the distribution points around the world and it obviously gets very expensive at a certain point.
They probably just kicked over that point where it just wasn't feasible any more and got themselves into trouble.
Pumpkin Patch was relaunched as an online brand but what else did your team do specifically to resolve those key issues?
We really refined the supply chains for us now because we primarily focused the offerings online.
We have a much more refined team of designers, all of the stock resides in our warehouse along with all of our other product so we've mastered that supply chain and logistics part of the business.
By only selling online, we also reduced all of those overheads that you had when you had brick and mortar stores.
Did your team make any changes to the eCommerce approach to really facilitate that switch from the brick and mortar to the online marketplace?
eCommerce is the core of our business, it's what we specialise in.
For us, it was just a logical next step to build the Pumpkin Patch website, throw the products up there and merchandise them as we would in our other speciality products.
We merchandise fashion off Catch every day of the week so we merchandise Pumpkin Patch the same way.
How did you modify the site to be able to build the brand online?
Catch is an image driven site driven by large images, great photographers and a nice portrayal of fashion and we've done the same with Pumpkin Patch.
We've made a few tweaks where we could get more imagery on the site and we definitely needed more product images so that people feel more comfortable buying these products for their kids.
So we made some tweaks around the edge but fundamentally, it is the Catch platform.
Where are the majority of customers for Pumpkin Patch coming from at the moment?
Pumpkin Patch is a much loved brand so a lot of the customers really are those fans and aficionados that have been with the Pumpkin brand for a long time.
So obviously across Australia and New Zealand and also those who are discovering it via Catch and also through all the marketing that we've put into the world.
What changes did your team make in the back end for the website or was there not a lot that needed to be done there?
No, not a lot that needed to be done from our side. We're still from the same platform as Catch so not much changes on the back end at all.
How is your team managing the new distribution channels, are you needing a new warehouse or are you using the space Pumpkin Patch may have previously had?
We use the same warehouse as Catch. We've sectioned off an area specifically for Pumpkin Patch products and we deliver it from there.