Australian retail brand Country Road
This fashion and lifestyle brand is so well known in Australia that there isn’t a single person who doesn’t know it. Australia’s two big department stores, Myer and David Jones, stock Country Road, which has also opened more than 110 stores across Australia alone.
Country Road launched as a women’s shirt brand in 1974, opening its first store in Melbourne. It then opened in Myer, Australia’s largest department store, and expanded into New Zealand in 1984. It then branched into menswear in 1986, and two years later it added accessories before expanding into the USA, then Asia in 1993, in Singapore, Jakarta, and Hong Kong.
I first discovered Country Road when I was 21, when I first visited Sydney, Australia for sightseeing. There was a Country Road store in the Queen Victoria Building, a shopping center inside a beautiful, historic building. Most Country Road clothes are simple and basic, which didn’t really suit me at the time, but I remember thinking, “They’ve opened up in this well-known department store, so the brand must be pretty popular in Australia.”
Country Road carries casual lines, like T-shirts and denim, as well as business lines you can wear in the office. It has also branched out into clothes for teens and kids, and home interior goods. They offer trendy items reflecting the latest fashion, but mainly focus on basic, long-wearing items.
By the way, Mimco is a company in the Country Road group offering handbags, purses, and accessories. Fifteen years ago, it boomed in Australia and for a time every single Australian girl had a Mimco bag. For that matter, Country Road’s popularity hasn’t risen or fallen much. It is more a stable brand that the people who like it keep on liking. Maybe it was just that I didn’t know about it, and it was all the rage in the past. You still see a lot of inferior products, with sloppy sewing, as well as very noticeable fading and incredible shrinkage from washing put out by fast fashion brands in recent times, but Country Road places importance on the quality and durability of their materials. Prices for business items are around AUD150, about AUD50-60 for T-shirts, AUD150-200 for trousers or jeans, and AUD130-200 for sandals or sneakers, which, quite frankly, is not cheap but not expensive, a well-balanced price range. In Japan you can get things of about the same quality for less, so I guess it’s because this is Australia that people pay those prices.
The company has not deviated from its brand image and style ever since it was launched, as well as high quality that people have liked over the years, it does adopt trends to some extent, but its style has never been swayed by fads too much, which is perhaps the reason Australians have stuck close to the brand for so long.
Actually, I have never bought any Country Road clothes (LOL). For me now, the style is too simple and still doesn’t really suit me, just like when I was 21. But in the future, once I’m a bit older, I might want to wear simple coordinates, and you never know, I might wear Country Road clothes some time. So, I hope the brand is still going well in another 10 or 20 years.
Left: A stylish dress even in mini length Right: The designs are mainly simple and basic
The standard bag: The cotton bags they put out every season come in different colors and patterns.
These are in the men’s section. They also have more colorful ones for women.
