No Biz Like Shoobiz

It's an unhappy start to 2009 for Shoobiz's 220 sales staff. Image: Sweded

It seems the global economic crisis has slipped its size eight footsies into Australian shoe retail chain Shoobiz. The ill-spelled, puntastic footwear brand is closing all its 43 stores, potentially leaving 220 workers out of a job. Twenty-six stores will close by 20 February and another 17 over the next three months.

Shoobiz’s parent company, Melbourne-based Figgins Holdings, said the closures were due to “the change in consumer behaviour and increasing costs”, reports the Herald Sun.

Figgins also owns the Midas, Mollini, Scooter, Florsheim, Emporio and Evelyn Miles brands, and in addition to axing Shoobiz, the company plans to consolidate its brands by selling Florsheim and rebranding its six high-end Evelyn Miles boutiques as Midas stores.

Established in 1983, Shoobiz is Figgins’s cheapest brand and sells other Figgins-branded shoes as well as Australian mid-price brands including Tony Bianco, RMK, Croft and Julius Marlow.

Shoobiz’s 220-odd staff were told about the company’s manoeuvres on Tuesday, but so far have not received written notice or been told whether they will receive redundancy payouts. Figgins has said it will endeavour to find Shoobiz staff other positions within the company.

This news does not come as much of a surprise for observers of the brand. It has been cannibalised by its sister brand Scooter, which bills itself as “a little bit quirky, a little bit different and always having fun”, seemingly in the pursuit of a ‘Sex and the City: The Next Generation‘ market.

And perhaps inadvertently, it has skewed upmarket and conservative in the face of the industry-wide trend towards ‘fast fashion’. The “change in consumer behaviour” to which Figgins referred in its statement might well be consumers’ appetite for increasingly cheap, poor quality imports that reflect the most up-to-the-minute styles.

Shoobiz’s pricing and discounting have simply not been aggressive enough to woo the teenagers and students who were once its main customers, but who can now buy a pair of full-priced shoes for under $40 from fast-fashion chains such as Novo and Cotton On’s Rubi brand, as well as traditional discount sellers such as Payless.

Discount department stores Target, Kmart and Big W are also prominent in the low end of the footwear market – especially when it comes to generic styles that don’t follow fashion cycles and are in demand all year round. These include rubber thongs, canvas slip-ons and cheap brands such as Grosby and Dunlop.

With an average full price of around $80 per pair, Shoobiz has become boxed into a corner. Figgins is smart to be cutting its losses.

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