Eva Galambos got her start in the fashion industry nearly 30 years ago, working for labels including Giorgio Armani, Nicole Farhi and French Connection in the UK. After returning to Australia in the late 1990s, Galambos started her own firm representing and developing the wholesale division of many prominent Australian designer brands.
In 2001, she opened Parlour X, a multi-brand boutique, which over the years has become one of the leading destinations for luxury women’s fashion in Australia. Located in a hundreds-year-old church in Sydney, Parlour X stocks Balenciaga, Comme des Garcons, Isabel Marant, Romance Was Born and Valentino, among other labels.
Galambos makes buying trips to Europe six times a year and says she has developed an innate sense of what will resonate with her Australian clientele. In this interview, she talks about importance of physical locations and why luxury is booming.
Inside Retail Weekly: How has the last year been for Parlour X?
Eva Galambos: The business is growing, and in a precarious climate, I’m happy with the pace with which we’re moving forward. It feels manageable because we have quite a lot of infrastructure in place already. We’ve prepared for this growth over the last two years and it feels as if we’re facilitating it the way we need to. When I say ‘manageable’, that has a connotation with the word ‘average’, but I don’t mean it in that way at all. Our growth has surpassed expectations. The fact that it’s manageable is an unbelievable bonus. When we moved from our smaller boutique to our larger boutique [in 2015], the growth was phenomenal, but it almost felt unmanageable. Fast forward to today, and we’re super excited by the healthy growth we’re having, but even more excited by the fact that we’re able to manage it from an internal infrastructure and human resources perspective.
IRW: Are there any key milestones you’re hoping to achieve in 2018?
EG: One of the biggest and best milestones in 2018 so far has been getting a grip on our internal operations and making sure we’re operating as effectively internally as we are externally. I’m a very inside-out type of human being. I don’t prescribe to the smoke-and-mirrors or fake-it-til-you-make-it mentality. I like to have a very transparent view of my operations. If it looks amazing on the outside, it has to feel amazing on the inside for me to feel the full glory of the success. When the business was going through exciting growth three years ago and it felt bigger than Ben-Hur, I was feeling cautious as our internal processes needed to be just as advanced. In our industry, there has always been that smoke-and-mirrors pretext, but my approach has always been far more holistic.
RW: How did Parlour X come to be one of the leading destinations for luxury in Australia?
EG: At the end of the day, there are a few reasons why a business like ours, a multi-brand boutique, is a leading boutique. One of the most important aspects is the edit — the brand mix and the buy. The other most important thing is location, not just your physical presence, but also your online presence. I don’t think anything else in Australia matches our physical presence. There are other boutiques that have a magnificent brand mix and are doing a great job, but they’re not located where we’re located.
If you look at the most iconic multi-brand boutiques in the world, where, when a brand says they’re stocked in certain boutiques, there’s a handful of boutiques they mention — like The Webster in Miami and New York, Maxfield in LA, or Dover Street Market — they are some of the most magnificent merchandised and choreographed spaces in the world. It’s based on the physical location being as much a part of the experience as the actual goods on sale and the quality of the space matching the quality of the brands being stocked within it.
What sets us apart as well is that there’s no other luxury operator in Australia that is bricks-and-mortar and has a healthy strong established online presence.
IRW: How does e-commerce fit into your overall offering?
EG: For us, e-commerce is…it’s impossible to not have it. I fail to understand how businesses that plan to grow are able to not think along these lines. I think that if you plan to entirely rely on bricks-and-mortar stores in the future, there’s greater risk of your business not being able to survive. At the same time, if you haven’t entered into that landscape yet, entering into it now is really complicated. We started our e-commerce store eight years ago, but it was a really slow burn and never really matched the physical presence. That’s why we never pushed it as hard as we have over the last three years, because we managed to gain the resources we needed to develop and cultivate a team and create a beautiful site that matched some of the best sites in the world, from a functionality perspective and also a visual perspective.
We’re really proud of our e-commerce site today. We have an in-house photographer, and in-house graphic designer, a website operations team, a dispatch team in our inventory team…we’ve got big mechanics working towards developing our operations and growing them all the time. We set really high benchmarks because we know our major competitors all over the world are also setting benchmarks, and they’re high too. What has become tricky is that our major competitors have become global online luxury giants that have massive budgets in place. It’s no longer a case of local businesses being competitors. It doesn’t work like that anymore. When you’re online, you’re global. You can’t think locally. Our clients don’t think locally, they think globally. They all shop online as well as in bricks-and-mortar stores, and online is capturing more and more of their interest and more and more of their business.
IRW: Parlour X shoots every item in-house and displays original images on the website, and designers create capsule collections that are only available to your customers. Why is exclusivity so important to you?
EG: It’s really important to my clients at the end of the day. And we have to have a point of difference. Our biggest point of difference is our buy and our edit. Everyone in the world is buying from similar collections. Making sure that what we offer our clients feels and looks really different to any of our competitors is really important. Obviously, we pride ourselves on having great service, we have great relationships with our clientele, but so does everybody else. We need to keep striving to have other points of difference, so our clients want to shop with us more and more as opposed to less and less.
And I guess we’re also buying for our own market as well, so getting into the mindset of what an Australian luxury shopper wants to buy gives me an edge. All of the other luxury online players are from other markets, but they’re buying for the Australian market. That obviously makes a difference as well when we’re doing exclusive capsule collections. I’m taking my knowledge and understanding of my clients needs and adapting that through a commercial prism. It allows me to buy things that resonate with them and makes sense to them.
IRW: Along these same lines, your store in Sydney is a nearly 200-year-old church and looks unlike any other in the country. Why did you choose this property and how has impacted your business since you moved there?
EG: It’s not just the beauty of the space, but also the magnitude of the space. It’s three times the size of our previous location, but the business has more than tripled in size since we moved. We have our warehousing to the side and underneath the building, so the sheer amount of space lends itself to huge growth. And in terms of the beauty of the store adding to the experience, luxury shoppers love beautiful things and love being in a beautiful environment.
As much as we work hard to cultivate our online business, we started out as a bricks-and-mortar business, and that’s still my baby. And I still believe a lot of luxury shoppers prefer to touch and feel and make their selections up-close in person themselves. If they’re able to do so in a space that makes them feel comfortable, it’s going to add to the experience.
IRW: You weren’t apprehensive about choosing such a unique property?
EG: No, it was a challenge that I found really exciting. We were growing really rapidly and were bursting out of the seams with our last space, and I was never going to move anywhere that I didn’t think was bigger and better. I’m not a side-stepper, so it was always going to be a step up. It was just about making sure that we found something that was going to be as exciting as what we believed it could be. Fortunately, it has been received that way.
IRW: Are there more stores in your future?
EG: Online expansion will be the ‘more stores’ in our future. It’s not like we can find another church. But in all reality, I also work in the business and I’m here 24/7 with my team. We work really closely together, and splitting myself into another location would not be realistic.
IRW: The retail industry more broadly is struggling, with declining sales, rampant discounting and a seeming confusion about what customers really want. Is luxury experiencing any of these challenges?
EG: Over the last however many years, all the different levels of the market have been merged together. When people talk about the fashion industry, they talk about fast fashion and luxury in the same context, and it never used to be like that. Fast fashion is struggling, and from my perspective, I can totally see why. But luxury is not struggling; it’s actually doing quite well. I think we need to go back to separating them to get to the truth about what people are thinking and feeling within the industry.
Luxury is about craftsmanship, design, aesthetics, creativity and setting trends. Fast fashion is about emulating all of that and commoditising it. It’s meant to be worn a couple times and then it falls apart and ends up in landfill. Everyone is waking up to that, and what’s happening now is we’re dissecting and scrutinising everything to such an extent that people have lost sight of the big picture. On the one hand we want to make everything accessible, so we go to fast fashion, but on the other hand, it’s bad for the environment, it’s ruining the idea of creativity because people have been ripped off and there’s an over-supply in a shrinking market. A lot of the typical fast fashion consumers are younger, and they’re becoming more educated and don’t necessarily want fast fashion to the same extent that they once did. There are a lot of people that started fast fashion businesses that don’t know how to adapt them now. I think that’s why so many are going into receivership and there’s a lot of clutching of straws so to speak.
But that end of the market is so far from what I do — I’m just speculating as any outsider would. In the luxury sector, sales are booming. If you look at the figures that come out of the LVMH portfolio and Kering, the growth is just phenomenal. It’s mind-blowing. That’s why I think it would be better for everybody if they just separated luxury and fast fashion into different markets, because one is booming and one is not. Because they are actually two separate industries.
IRW: Why do you think luxury is booming?
EG: There are a lot of different reasons. For starters, social media has become the greatest influence of almost every generation that exists today, and one of the biggest drivers of social media is fashion and status. People are seeking luxury to reflect and demonstrate their happiness, state of life, sense of self…it has become a barometer for so many people in terms of how they perceive themselves and those around them.
The explosion of e-commerce has also made luxury very accessible, so that’s another massive component. Ten or twenty years ago, most of the big brands would wholesale to a lot of small boutiques all over the world. But now there are so many huge online players with massive budgets — they’re so much bigger than any one retailer could have been — that they’ve overtaken the interest and focus of the designer brands. As a result, they have monopolised the industry so to speak.
IRW: When you started out, you famously bought in-season from European fashion houses, rather than a season behind, which is what many other Australian buyers/retailers were doing. Is trans-seasonality still a challenge in the fashion industry?
EG: We’re talking 18 years ago when I first started Parlour X and annoyed a lot of the other retailers in Australia, because they were buying a season behind. I was reeducating clients into thinking that they didn’t need to buy a season behind. The buyers just needed to buy better. They may have needed to buy opposite seasons, but it was doable. Fast forward to today, I can’t imagine there’s even one retailer in Australia that would dare to do that anymore.
You can’t delude the public, you can’t deceive them, you can’t attempt to be smarter than them, because they’re savvy. They get it. And they’re not going to want to shop with you.
I don’t think trans-seasonality was ever a problem, but when you go back 20 years ago and more, a lot of fashion business owners were not business people, they were fashion people. It was about creativity, buying and travelling. It was a lifestyle. But again, fast forward to today, and you cannot be a player in this market unless you’ve got serious business acumen and you’re able to negotiate and withstand the ups and downs of a really turbulent and testy industry.
You can’t be someone who wakes up one day and says, ‘I love fashion so much, that I want to be a buyer or own a shop’. It doesn’t work that way. It will be really difficult to get product because so many people have exclusivity in terms of branding. You’ve got companies that aren’t even Australian that monopolise the Australian industry. You’ve got companies that are British-based or American-based that have dibs on the Australian market and block Australian retailers. And I’m not even talking just fashion, I’m talking everything. I’ve been watching this for quite a few years and it’s demoralising. I’m pretty lucky because Parlour X is an 18-year-old business and I’ve got firm relationships in place and work really hard to make my presence known, but that’s not to say I don’t see it all the time.
It’s really hard because I came from an industry where it wasn’t just about money. There were so many more factors at play than just bigger and better budgets, but over time, that’s changed. It can be really difficult because it’s not about what’s right or what’s fair, it’s about who has a bigger budget. I’m not saying that’s the case with everyone, but it’s definitely not just my industry — I see it all over the place.
And because of the onslaught of e-commerce and social media, everybody’s trying to process what’s going on around them. There’s an overload of information, information technology, social information, and the speed and pace at which we’re able to process and apply that doesn’t feel fast enough for the change that’s happening before our very eyes. You’ve got very accomplished, smart, capable, experienced people that are left like spinning tops because the influx of information is too fast, the processing of information takes too long and it becomes complicated.
It’s no longer about skills and appreciation and craftsmanship and value. It’s about capital and who’s got more of it. I don’t think it will always be like this. Eventually it will stabilise, but we’re right in the midst of it right now.
IRW: When you go on buying trips to Europe, what styles, materials, details are you looking for that will resonate with Australian consumers?
EG: At the end of the day, my processes are very inherent. I can dissect them, but they probably wouldn’t make sense to you, and they’re always changing because collections change, the industry changes and I have to adapt and change really quickly with it. So the truth of the matter is there is no formula.
For more than 18 years, I’ve been working as a buyer with Parlour X and for 12 years during and prior to that I was a wholesaler marketing agent. The years of experience allow me to look at collections, feel the fabrication, see the silhouette and innately know and understand what’s going to resonate with my clientele and my market. There’s no one given formula, it’s years and years of working alongside and with my team, being really closely connected to my clientele and understanding what their needs are and physically being present on the boutique shop floor when I need to be and physically present all the time in the building. It’s being acutely aware.
IRW: As with every aspect of retail, data has come to play a bigger role in the buying process. Do you think data is helpful in making a buying decision, or do you rely on your gut?
EG: Are you kidding? In this day and age, of course you need data!
IRW: But it sounds like your buying process is based on knowing whether something will work when you see it?
EG: We’re talking luxury here, so we’re talking craftsmanship, beauty and aesthetics. Does someone go and choose a work of art based on statistics? No. But we don’t have 10 paintings for sale at Parlour X, we have 500 different styles, so of course analytics have to be applied when you’re dealing with a lot of product. But at the end of the day, they are still products of beauty and desire, so there has to be a combination of statistics and analytics, but also personal taste, history, knowledge and understanding based on experience.
What’s really interesting is that a lot of the major online retailers have huge buying departments, and the people that work there and at department stores chop and change from season to season, because there have been a lot of changes in the industry and if there are buying mistakes, one minute you’re in and the next minute you’re out. Those are the people who are number-crunching and looking at statistics more than aesthetics, because if they’re relatively young and new and don’t have a lot of experience, then what are they basing decisions on other than statistics or personal taste?
Of course we have to number-crunch and look at reports and analyse what’s selling and what isn’t, so that we don’t make the same buying mistakes we’ve made in the past, or so that we can emulate our great decisions for the season ahead. But at the same time, there has to be some sort of personality within the buying process, otherwise it’s a robotic process, and again, the customer can sense that. It can’t just come down to number-crunching, otherwise you’ll have an entire boutique full of black pants and black pencil skirts.
IRW: One of the major trends we’re seeing lately is the rise of direct-to-consumer, as businesses that used to primarily wholesale are able to reach customers relatively easily online. This has serious implications for traditional multi-brand retailers like Parlour X. How are you handling this?
EG: I don’t actually think it has a lot of impact on us. There’s an over-supply in the marketplace, and whether that comes from bricks-and-mortar retail or e-commerce, it doesn’t matter. There are also a lot of choices out there, and it can be really overwhelming for a lot of people to go online and start researching and finding brands. That’s really time consuming, and everybody is working around the clock, achieving, trying to live. So in fact, a lot of people come into our space and say, ‘I love online shopping, because I’m sitting there watching Netflix and putting things in my bag’, but they’re not necessarily completing that sale. They’re just having fun with the process. It’s actually faster for them to come in, try things on, decide whether they want to have it or not and walk away with the purchase in their hand.
Going back to the impact of social media — what’s happened is people are wanting the exact same thing they see someone wearing, with the promise that they’re going to have that exact same lifestyle. When you have curated collections in a multi-brand business, it allows clients to do their own selection and have a bit of creativity behind it, instead of just going onto social media and seeing something they like and wanting to copy the exact same look by buying the exact same item.
