MFG co-CEO Marcus Bartlett talks The Trybe acquisition and omnichannel growth

A few weeks before Accent Group approached Munro Footwear Group (MFG) about acquiring its kids’ shoe business The Trybe, the privately held company’s co-CEOs Marcus Bartlett and Jay Munro discussed the same idea.

“[We] had been walking some shopping centres, and we did make reference to, ‘It’d be great to get our hands on something like The Trybe,’ because it does fit a couple of gaps for us,” Bartlett told Inside Retail.

One of those gaps is kids’ footwear.

Founded in 1962, MFG has a portfolio of 250 bricks-and-mortar stores under the Williams, Midas, Mathers and Mountfords banners, as well as e-commerce sites for these and other brands, including Diana Ferrari, Ziera, Bobux, Colorado and Mollini. It also operates the online marketplace Styletread and has a wholesale arm.

However, except for Bobux, a New Zealand baby, toddler and kids’ shoe brand that MFG acquired last year, its product offering is geared towards older customers.

“We have a very strong 30-year plus history in back-to-school, but that’s a six- to eight-week window for our Williams and Mathers brands,” Bartlett said. “We’ve always had aspirations to have a vehicle that would allow us to participate in kids’ [footwear] all year round.”

The Trybe targets kids up to 10 years old and offers a mix of lifestyle, performance and school products. It also stocks popular global brands such as Nike, Adidas, Hoka, Crocs, Vans, Converse and On, which fills another gap for MFG.

About 80 per cent of MFG’s business is vertical brands, Bartlett said, so getting “strong exposure to brands, particularly branded sneakers, is something that we’ve aspired to”.

“It’s always been a question of, what’s the right vehicle for that?” he added.

Short answer: The Trybe.

Potential to reach 50 stores

The sale was announced on August 23 and the full handover will take place by the end of October. MFG has offered all of The Trybe’s retail staff and some of its office workers employment opportunities.

Bartlett said he feels “encouraged” by the conversations he has had with The Trybe’s brand partners around their continued support.

“We want to protect what’s been established and really support it and help it to grow,” he said. “For us, that’s the real opportunity.”

The Trybe currently has 16 bricks-and-mortar stores in Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia, and Bartlett sees a clear path to reaching 25 stores, and possibly even 40 or 50.

“Finding the right centre is often easier than finding the right location and the right timing within the centre, so it’s hard to put a time frame on it,” he said.

While MFG considered the current economic climate in its decision-making process, Bartlett said the business ultimately felt that the opportunity was too good to pass up – both because of The Trybe’s strong performance and its alignment with MFG’s portfolio.

“It’s been a challenging period of time for retail with the cost-of-living crisis. We’re certainly not immune to that, and our customers are not immune to that,” Bartlett said.

However, he added that the risks “were largely mitigated by [The Trybe’s] current performance, the opportunity that we see for long-term performance, and we felt it was an opportunity that we really needed to make work”.

Accent Group, which founded The Trybe in 2019, did not disclose the terms of the deal.

Bartlett said the cost was “somewhere in the middle” of MFG’s acquisition of Fusion Retail Brands in 2017 – which introduced the Diana Ferrari, Mathers, Williams and Colorado brands, and about 200 bricks-and-mortar stores, into the business – and its more recent acquisition of Ziera and Bobux out of voluntary administration and receivership, respectively.

MFG’s annual turnover, excluding The Trybe, is around $330 million, Bartlett said.

M&A background

A few years before he joined MFG as its CFO in 2017, Bartlett worked at Wesfarmers, where he was involved in the acquisition of Coles Group and later Guy Russo’s turnaround of Kmart Group.

“It was at the time when they had landed on the strategy of how they wanted to turn the business around and what the key focuses would be, so it was interesting to see that unfold, and obviously to watch the success since then,” he said.

This M&A experience has been critical to MFG. The Trybe is its 10th acquisition in 10 years, and Bartlett has played a key role in integrating these businesses under one group and creating a shared services mentality across functions like logistics and property.

More recently, he has been leading a transformation agenda to ensure the business has the right platforms, people, strategies and systems in place to grow.

“We’ve opened a new distribution center and put in a new point-of-sale across all our existing stores,” he said. “A lot of work has gone into better understanding the customer.”

In April, Williams launched Shoebucks, a loyalty program, and Bartlett said that other loyalty programs are in the works. Another area of focus is store expansion across Williams, Midas, Mathers and The Trybe.

“We are still very much believers in physical retail in terms of developing that true omnichannel experience,” he said.

Noting that many customers start shopping in-store and finish online where they can search for the best offer, or vice versa, Bartlett said it’s about making the journey as seamless as possible.

While he acknowledged that current trading conditions might make the numbers a little harder to stack up when it comes to store expansion, he said, “We’ve been in retail long enough to know that these cycles end eventually and you’ve got to set yourself up for success when they do.”

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