P.E Nation CEO Hamish Stuart sits down with Ragtrader to unpack the brand's recent rebrand and what it means for the future.
What are the primary objectives behind P.E Nation's recent rebranding?
Over the past eight years, P.E Nation has grown to become one of Australia’s most loved activewear labels among our community of brand loyalists. While we see our customer base transcend generations, the evolution is primarily aimed at focusing on what we’ve identified as some of our weaker spots penetrating target audiences and improving brand saliency among them.
What are the key external factors driving this change and why?
Global fashion trends, economic influences and our consumer market rapidly shifted off the back of an incomparable pandemic. The business went from athleisure being the new work-from-home uniform, and we really needed to step back and assess the state of play following that time.
We had to assess how the world had evolved, and where P.E Nation was going to position itself as part of that. Consumers’ values, desires and needs have changed, so we had to really dissect brand and product to develop a strategy that would connect with our customers (existing and emerging) in a more meaningful and impactful way again.
Brand co-founder Claire Greaves has also stepped away from her day-to-day duties looking after the brand. Has this impacted the brand shift too?
Claire was very much a part of building the strategy before she decided to empower the team and step back from her day-to-day duties.
How does P.E Nation plan to differentiate itself in the highly competitive activewear market post-transformation? What do you see as the key winning strategies here?
I think our positioning is key to where we’ll be playing, and why we chose Australian Fashion Week to unveil the new collection and tell our story. P.E Nation applies a fashion lens first and foremost to all its designs. We’re not only about performance, we make active lifestyles fashionable.
Throughout this, our focus has been to do less, but do it better. We’ll continue to identify new opportunities and collaborations (like Stanley) that reinforce our fashion and active lifestyle positioning, allowing the brand to be brought to life in new ways (connected to our strategy and pillars) which excite our customers and broaden our appeal to new demographics.
Will there be any changes to P.E Nation's distribution model?
We’ve remained steady with our global distribution, currently at 142 stockists worldwide, our online team are constantly exploring improvements and optimising plans, and in terms of our owned retail, we are really set on expanding our bricks and mortar footprint, not only in Australia but our key markets of the United Kingdom and the United States.
What level of investment has been made to support this brand transformation?
We’ve worked our existing budget harder, found efficiencies, driven value, and worked with our teams – internal and external – to get a lot tighter on objectives, scope, and most importantly our expected results. Our success depends very much on their intelligence, diligence and motivation, so improving relationships and ensuring they were brought in early and bought into the strategy from the get-go was key.
What are P.E Nation's growth projections and key milestones for the next few years?
Given we feel very much as though we’re back to a start-up phase again, we’re really looking to learn from our first two collections launching to market this year (Re/Creation in July and Rec Club in Oct), to help inform where we go next. Our online data and wholesale buys are indicating increasing interest from the UK and we’ve been relatively consistent in the US for some time now. AU still comprises around 80% of our customer base, so we will continue to look for growth in all three markets whilst keeping an eye on any emerging (such as Germany, Poland, Brasil and the UAE).
Any other news to share?
Over the last 6-12 months we’ve put a strong and experienced senior leadership team in place, with the appointment of John Parkes as Head of Digital, Sara Lloyd (Ragtrader’s top 15 marketing minds in Australian Fashion previously) as Head of Brand & Marketing, and Ben Pollitt as Head of Product. All playing a strategic role in the re-creation of P.E Nation.