The Slow Death of Maternity Wear

The Slow Death of Maternity Wear

It seems we are living in a world where the only thing that matters is the price! It's killing retail in Australia and I am writing this blog in the hope that people start to heed the warnings.

You've all heard the arguments as to why we shouldn't by Home Brand milk and if you have been living under a rock and you haven't heard, Home Brand milk is sending our farmers broke! If we continue to think only of saving a few dollars today we will end up having to import milk tomorrow. Imagine if all we could buy was long life milk from China???

The same argument applies to to buying SPC over Heinz or Ardmona over Homebrand. If we don't start supporting Australian owned companies who produce their product in Australia we are going to end up playing right into the hands of Woolies and Coles. There will be no choice other than to buy their brands because everyone else will have gone broke and they will be free to raise the price however high they like. What's more is that while they are using Australian product in a lot of their Homebrand products, they screw the farmers right down on price and once the farmers go broke the product will have to be sourced from overseas.

So what has this got to do with maternity wear?

It's exactly the same. Everyone is being conditioned by the big players (Target, Big W etc) to not paying more than about $30 for any item of clothing. They can do this because of the sheer volume of stock they can have produced at any one time in China. Small businesses cannot compete!

A few years ago there were several maternity wear stores across Australia. In Brisbane alone, when I started in the industry in 2000, there were at least 11 around Brisbane and the Gold and Sunshine Coasts. Now there are none on the Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast, Ipswich or Toowoomba and there are only 4 dedicated maternity stores in Brisbane. There are a few little boutiques that do a bit of everything (baby clothes, furniture, maternity etc) but still only about another 2. David Jones and Myers don't sell maternity and the range in Big W, Target, etc is small and ugly to say the least.

So why are maternity stores not thriving if they have little or no competition?

The big players realised a long time ago that selling to niche markets is not their thing. For them it is too much time and money for too little return, besides many people tend to just buy normal clothes that are a bit stretchier or more flowy than normal.

Back in 2000, prices on Maternity Wear weren't nearly as high as they are today but they weren't very fashionable either. Styles started to improve but that conincided with the downturn of our economy and a series of years where normal fashion looked more like maternity fashion. Many small businesses in all industries started to falter and slowly maternity stores started to disappear.

Thie left the suppliers with no option but to open their own retail stores and go into direct competition with their wholesale clients.

Prices started to increase as suppliers were unable to have clothes made in large enough quantities to secure prices in China anywhere near what the larger stores could do. In many cases, maternity wear is still made in Australia because the suppliers can't afford to have them made in China. That's great for Australia of course but not if the price of the garment is more than people are prepared to pay.

Ideally, we need more Maternity Stores so that the suppliers can have garments made in larger quantities and that would bring the price down. At the same time this would increase awareness amongst the pregnant community. So many times I have a customer walk into the store and say "Wow, I wish I had known you were here earlier!" It seems the reason they don't know we exist is they don't look. For some reason, many people don't know that specialty maternity stores exist and if things keep going the way they are, pretty soon they won't exist.

I know, I know! I can hear you all saying that it's fine to ask you to spend an extra few dollars on milk but with maternity it's a lot more than a few dollars. This is true but again, its a catch 22. If more people buy maternity wear from specialty maternity wear stores, then more stores will open. Demand will increase and price will come down. Choice will also increase.

Now the maternity industry is not totally blameless. Some people in this industry have been around since the dinosaurs existed and they firmly believe that they must get a certain mark up to survive. The suppliers hold the same therories as true. What they fail to see is that just maybe, if the suppliers dropped their margins and the retailers in turn dropped their margins we could make a significant change to the average price of maternity wear. As long as the number of sales increased as a result of this, we could all be better off but it is something that all of us in the industry need to work together on and I can't ever see that happening.

Anyway, this is why you will see so many of the prices at Maternity Revolution are well below anyone else's. It's not that I get them at a better price than anyone else but I'm just trying to move more stock faster at a lower markup than everyone else. But its still are hard slog. People have pre-conceived ideas that you don't wear maternity for long, or you can only wear it when you are pregnant. As I said earlier, anything over $30 is considered expensive and there is no way we can ever get prices down to these sorts of levels.

There is also the matter of quality. When you buy a $30 top from a major store, if it lasts a few months you are satisfied. With maternity most people by minimal pieces and wear them day after day after day for months and sometimes for several pregnancies. So sure, the top cost you $60 instead of $30 but you are probably going to get double the wear out of it.

The bottom line is we need more pregnant ladies to support us or we will all dispappear. The size 8 - 16 ladies will be fine as long as they don't mind choosing from the meager pickings at Target and Big W and as long as they don't need work wear or evening wear. The very small and very large ladies will have no other choice than to have their clothes made and as for maternity bras. well if you are bigger than a DD cup it will be very slim pickings. Those over an F cup will have to have their bras made or look overseas. Online shopping will become your only choice and as much of this will be overseas it won't be a quick or easy process.

Above all else, the one thing that a specialty maternity wear store can offer that you can't get from a major chain is service!  When you come into my store you are greeted, we can help you with every last detail or we can leave you alone to wander freely and try on as much as you like. The choice is yours. If we don't have something in store we will try to order it. We give advice, have a firendly returns policy, have toilets in store, somewhere for your children to play and your partner to sit.

Do you really want to live in a country that produces nothing for itself and has no more farms, no more country towns, no more small businesses?

Sure there are some people that financially just don't have a choice but to buy the cheapest of everything but the rest of you are just being cheap and in the end, you are just cheating yourselves.

Lisa Hovar
Maternity Revolution