It's not everyday you get to buy out your competitor. Outland Denim founder James Bartle did just that when he snapped up some of the key assets from Nobody Denim late last year after the Australian business fell into voluntary administration, owing $3.6 million to creditors.
In the eventual transaction, Outland Denim acquired Nobody Denim’s intellectual property, a bunch of its inventory and some of the equipment from its now-closed manufacturing facility Denim 108 in Melbourne. The entire process took around three months to complete, and it was mired by challenges.
“When an opportunity like that comes along, it's not going to wait for you,” Bartle says. “So you have to decide whether you go for it and you stretch yourself or you sit it out.
“Sometimes the wisdom is to sit it out absolutely but I think in this case, it would have been crazy for us to sit back and just watch that slide into the hands of potentially another competitor.”
Bartle says that when he initially pitched to acquire the core assets, Outland Denim itself was already in a tough position - arguably not as tough as its competitor. At the time of the transaction, Outland had 12 staff working in the head office following a challenging post-COVID period that included a few redundancies.
Nobody Denim also fielded redundancies, including 40 staff being axed at its local manufacturing arm Denim 108 a few months prior to its collapse. ASIC documents noted that the manufacturing arm was Nobody’s largest creditor with $2.64 million owed.
Bartle says the Nobody brand had just over 20 staff on board when he was considering the purchase. Outland didn’t take staff in the sale, but they did offer jobs to some of them.
According to Bartle, the hardest part of the entire process was navigating all the people who would be affected by it.
“No one more than the staff that lost their jobs, or even the previous owners,” Bartle says. “That was a brand that they had built over two decades. It was their baby, you know.
“It's not a comfortable thing. It's not pleasant for anybody. As much as there's an opportunity for the buyer in a situation like that, nobody enjoys watching the discomfort that the other parties are having to go through as well.
“That's probably the most challenging part of an acquisition like that.”
Amidst all that was the synergising of two brands under one house and rightsizing both for growth. Key business shifts, including the merging of teams and processes, added a strain over the last year. And in the first quarter post-transaction, Bartle recorded a loss of sales.
But the winning combination for Bartle was having a skilled and motivated team that had the ability to take on new business procedures.
“We learned a lot in the process of taking on Nobody Denim,” he says. “The biggest one for me has been product development; just in how they develop product and how they go through that process versus how we were going through that process.
“So we were much faster going through a process by way of less steps, but we really slowed it down on the development side. Gosh, it makes a difference in elevating your product to be able to just find and notice the differences before it goes to market.”
A year on, Bartle is now successfully running both businesses, with Nobody’s wholesale business back in line with pre-acquisition levels, alongside a tightened design team.
The team has also brought all its warehousing back in-house, giving them the ability to do same day dispatch and enhance customer experience.
Bartle adds that both businesses are being run by the same amount of staff locally compared to when it was just Outland Denim, all buoyed by Outland’s owned manufacturing arm Maeka in Cambodia.
“I think that's the upside to all this,” Bartle says. “It's the efficiency that you can gain by running two brands. It doesn't cost twice as much to run two than it does to run one.
“There is a lot of crossover in well, obviously our staff - other than designers - everybody crosses over both brands. So we've got marketing crossing over both brands, we’ve got product development crossing over both brands, operation, finance. It makes more sense to have two brands than it does one.”
Maeka also benefitted in the purchase, with most of the manufacturing equipment from Denim 108 being sent to the Outland Denim factory.
Looking ahead, Bartle and his team of 12 have a lot of confidence in Nobody Denim ahead, with the aim to relaunch the brand into the international market in a year or two following more rightsizing and local scaling.