Rebel's Ell&Voo brand manager Thain Taylor joins Ragtrader in a Q&A, discussing the private label's evolution across conception, production and sustainability. His team includes apparel product engineer Nicole Price, womens apparel designer Marissa Li and developer Cyndi Liu.
What was the process behind launching the Ell&Voo brand?
We would first identify in the Rebel channel a customer segmentation that we were not talking to, and where the product offer we were receiving from external trade partners wasn't quite nailing the customer’s needs. For example: our Celsius brand, which is a very big fitness brand - globally there's no fitness-dominant brand in all aspects of fitness, so Celsius covers that.
So once we've done that, and we've identified a gap that we feel we need to build a brand in, we'll do a market study to work out the ROI. Ell&Voo got the tick in all those areas.
Then we’d built a creative workshop. For Ell&Voo, it was a two-day session where we went in with blank pieces of paper. We had a look at who the market was, who they were talking to, and try to work out who Ell&Voo was going to talk to.
Before we even had a name, before we even had a logo, we were coming up with a persona of the possible target consumer base. We would ask: what was her likes, what is her dislikes, what time would she wake up in the morning, where would she live, and all these types of things.
After those two days, we would then sit down as a brand development team - which was a private label team at that time - and extract all the information provided. So the good-old posted notes system where we're writing all these things down and sticking them up on the walls and then narrowing it down.
How many people were in that process?
About 40 to 50 of us sat in the original workshop, and that consisted of the business unit manager for apparel that sat with the head buyer for apparel, and her team. We had two head buyers, we had two coordinating teams, we had the marketing teams in there, we had top sales reps, we had visual merchanding.
In the room, it was 80% female and 20% male.
How many ranges does Ell&Voo produce per year?
Currently, we have two in brand ranges - a summer collection and a winter collection. We then have a core range, which is available all year round. So it's the staples: black tights, crop shorts, all that type of stuff.
And how many stores is the brand across?
All of Rebel's 156 stores.
What are the price points?
We're in a very, very competitive price bracket. We enter the market at around the $25 price bracket, and we go up. If we talk heavyweight jackets, we just break the $100 category. But if we are sitting with tights and crops, which is pretty much the primary component of our activewear, we are sitting in between the $30 to $50 bracket for crop tops, and $40 to $70 for tights.
What are the top-selling products for Ell&Voo?
We do tights very well, and that's purely down to the fit.
Our brand is operated here by a designer and our garment tech, so they are all in-house, and then we work with our development team based in China. The success has been working very closely with them, and working on our fabrics to make sure we're offering the best possible garment at the right price point, and then finding all those little details to make it fit better.
We also user test everything. So the internal team actually go out and train or use the product. When we do a fitting, we're in the gym, the models are on a running machine.
What are some of the ESG initiatives behind the Ell&Voo?
We really hold ourselves very highly accountable for our work ethic. Every brand lead personally visits every factory we work with; we physically put our own eyes in it - we walk through it, we go off on our own tangents. Sometimes you get a tour of a factory, and they take you where they want you to go and avoid where you shouldn't go.
The next part we look at is our footprint around water usage. So we work with our print houses and our dye houses in China that pass all the Chinese legislation, because that changed substantially in the last few years.
We also know that some of our print houses in some of our factories have Blue Sign certification. It's recycled water, so they don't use a lot of new water. We're striving to get all our factories in line with Blue Sign.
Then we really started to look at our materials and our impact in the materials. We wanted to find a reputable vendor who will supply the yarns, who will have all the certification behind them. We were lucky to source two very good yarn suppliers, who then supply our fabric mills, who will then go away and knit.
The focus is on our core range, which is the black one that's available all year, because that is our biggest volume.
We then moved into the main range, which is the in-brand collections released twice a year. I would say 85% of our crops and tights are all manufactured utilizing recycled material.
Not everything can be sustainable or recycled - like elastic, it's not possible yet. The finishes inside, sometimes the stitching, sometimes the metal components. So we don't say our product is made from recycled material, we say we incorporate recycled materials. Because then we're being true.
We also moved down to FSC paper - so all our hangtags are made from FSC.
Are there any new plans in the future for Ell&Voo?
Yes, we are looking at taking the collection down to a four-year-old for girls. Currently, we do some product that stops at eight years old.
Obviously, the world has changed in the last three years and people's version of activity is very different now. People want to get outdoors. So we're ensuring that our fabrics are all UPF rated. If we can get 50 UPF, that would be awesome.
We’re also looking at slightly more element-proof fabric, such as for rain.
*transcript edited for brevity.