Fashion’s nuts and bolts trade event Fashion Exposed opens in the Melbourne Exhibition Centre this weekend, February 22, 23 and 24. Its free business seminar series offers visitors, not only a seated breather between visits to hundreds of exhibitors, but an astonishing line-up of professionals ready to reveal some grass-roots tricks to making money in this ficklest of industries. Among the Voxfrock team’s ticked boxes is DBC Consulting’s retail guru David Bush, formerly general manager of David Jones, who will address a business breakfast on Sunday, and a seminar on Monday lead by Margaret Porritt, the dynamo behind vertical womenswear brand Feathers who has weathered 42 heart-pumping years in business. So far.
Voxfrock editor Janice Breen Burns recently met Mrs. Porritt in one of her rare, free and quiet moments…
Flogging frocks in Australia today is a knock-down, drag-out, slog-a-season business; anyone with a workroom, factory, or racks and a till can tell you that. One quarter you’re up, the next you’re scratching, then you’re up again, down again…
Hanging in there, as evidenced by the exodus of big names and sundry icons out of the industry recently, isn’t an art (or science) everyone can master, let alone sustain. Margaret Porritt, however, is one exception, a legendary hanger-onnerer. She’s celebrating 42 years of her Feathers mini-empire and intends to clock more. She’s floated to the top in fashion’s boom times, was once dubbed “Australia’s Donna Karan” for the pristine chic, quality and common sense of her womenswear (and, that’s never changed) but has also weathered its worst since 1972. Recessions, shrivelling markets, the en-masse migration of Aussie consumers to off-shore online shops, erosion of local manufacturing by “fair trade” policies and agressive unionism, the marching tsunamis of cheaper imported frocks: nothing phased the irrepressible Mrs. P. “Out of adversity come beautiful things,” she says. “The fashion business has given the kids and I a wonderful life.” Next Monday, February 24, she’ll gladly tell you all about it, honestly, with no punch—pulling: “I talk to a whole group just like I’m talking to you”, at a free seminar during Fashion Exposed’s business series.
Feathers Summer 13/14
Today though, she’s matey as an old friend as I trawl her back-story in the showroom of her flagship boutique in the chichi strip of Hawksburn in Melbourne. She was born to German immigrants more than 70 years ago; a high-ranking executive in the tyre business, and a milliner of exceptional talent. Mrs. Porritt’s mother, Herta Maria Newhouse (anglicised from Neuhaus), was a top milliner during Melbourne’s golden era of hats in the 1940s and 50s. The family lived above one of Herta’s three thriving shops. “That’s where I got my eye for fabrics and lines and simplicity,” Mrs. Porritt says. “I had such a love of fashion from an early age.” Such a love, that young Margaret eagerly served a millinery apprenticeship with her famous mother before rounding out her teens at a Swiss finishing school, then a year’s internship in London with “the queen’s dressmaker” Norman Hartnell. “No money, just glory.”
But, glory or no, potential or no, marriage and home duties were the more common endgame for young women’s aspirations in those days. “I married at 19, had three children by 26 and divorced by 32.” Mrs. Porritt pots those details with a hoot of laughter. “He nicked off with my best friend!”
And, therein lies the kernal of Margaret Porritt’s extraordinary life. “If it hadn’t happened, I’d never been in business.” She’s grateful now, in hindsight’s twisted way, for the desperation that fuelled her life as a single mother of three small sons. “I had maintenance of $54 a week. How could we live on that?! I had no choice.” A part time job fit with the boys’ school hours but wasn’t enough. “Jobs weren’t family friendly in those days either. I thought; “I have to be an employ-er.”” With the settlement money from a small block of joint-owned land released after her divorce, she bought a shop. Then another. “I’d never been in business.” But, Feathers, as she called her micro-retail chain, was soon renowned for its clever edit of top Australian designers: Carla Zampatti, Thomas Wardle Anthea Crawford, Country Road, Perri Cutten, George Gross. “It was a wonderful business.”
Winter 14
Those were the days. Until 1989, Mrs. Porritt worked hard, and the rewards just – piled up. “I made money from Day One,” she says. Eight shops, 50 staff. “It was pumping!” Every day of slog logically brought joys and profits and Mrs. Porritt finds herself sometimes, frustrated at how comparatively illogical the fashion business is now. “I feel for these young women going into business today,” she says. “If you knew just what it costs to keep 50 women in work: the super, the payroll tax, the work care, the redundancies, long service leave, maternity leave, sick leave, carer’s leave…” She pauses, because negative vibes aren’t natural phenomena between Feathers headquarters’ four walls. “No I’m not bitching, because I do have such a wonderful business with a wonderful, wonderful clientele,” she says, “But seriously, if you’re not working your guts out, and keeping it going, and keeping an eye out, closing dead stores, opening new stores; things change so fast, the sands shift that fast, you’ve got to know what to do, who’s next door, you’ve got to be so discerning…”
The 1989 recession could have killed Feathers, but instead, Mrs. Porritt consolidated her retail stores, introduced her own line of New-Yorkish Feathers womenswear with the slugline: “I couldn’t find them, so now I design them”, and in the next decade or two, nabbed a swag of accolades including Victorian Telstra Business Owner and induction into the Business Women’s Hall of Fame. Come the 2008 global financial crisis and its limping, but toxic wake in Australia, and Mrs. Porritt thrived through yet again. She has consolidated once more, closed six of her nine Myer concessions, opened a new one recently in Mossman (“Going like a rocket”), established a short-term pop-up, then, just this month, a regular clearance store above her 14th permanent Feathers boutique in Carlton; “Between Wittners and Milano Shoes; perfect“, and continues to whizz 20 per cent of Feathers sales through its online portal. Feathers’ collections and campaigns are pointed and thoughtful, with bulls-eye results in the heart of its modern mature women’s market. And, its social media presence is also carefully controlled and vetted, with a wry, humorous and philosophical bent blended with key collection photographs on Facebook, and strong ties on other platforms to popular, intelligent and ultimately feminine bloggers such as Phoebe Montegue of Lady Melbourne and Cecylia Kee of Cecylia.com.
Winter 14
Today, I feel we’ve glossed over the details of Mrs. Porritt’s life (did I mention her portrait shoots with Helmut Newton?) but missed some vital bits too. Perhaps we laughed too much, strayed into subjects not strictly relevant to Feathers (the exquisite pain of parenting, for example, and friendships, and husbands – no bastard in particular – who leave you high and dry!). Time was short and there was so much more drilling-down to do into this remarkable woman’s business acumen and the tricks, aggressive and subtle, she taught herself to circumvent fashion’s constant curve balls.
I’ll leave that for Monday.
Trade can visitors register free at Fashion Exposed, Melbourne Exhibition Centre, 2 Clarendon Street, South Wharf, from 9am. Saturday, February 22, or online here
Details and bookings for Sunday’s business breakfast with Mr. Bush, and three days’ of free seminars including Mrs. Porritt’s, are clickable here
Janice Breen Burns, jbb@voxfrock.com.au
