Effective partnerships between property landlords and their retail tenants are crucial for fostering vibrant, successful commercial spaces. In this exclusive Q&A feature, SCN invited six retail partners to share their personal experiences and career highlights and provide insights into their business – the current challenges, opportunities, trends, growth strategy and more! Here we feature Nicole Lazarou, General Manager of Property at Retail Apparel Group.

Retail Apparel Group had its beginnings in 1987 when Tarocash was founded. Today, the Group has more than 600 stores in Australia and New Zealand and six very successful brands. Each of its five menswear brands has broad appeal to both the value and mid-market segments and sells dressy, smart casual merchandise. Rockwear offers female customers superb value on-trend athleisurewear.

What is your current role and main responsibilities?

As the General Manager of Property, my role encompasses a wide range of responsibilities across the full spectrum of our retail store network in Australia and New Zealand. The objective of my role is to optimise the performance of our retail store network and facilitate and lead the growth of our six retail businesses within our stable.

To achieve these objectives, I am responsible for leading and managing the core functions of retail leasing, lease administration, capital expenditure, store design and delivery. These efforts of course, are supported by a very talented and experienced team of property executives.

In addition to this role, I am privileged to serve as a member of the Executive Steering Committee for Retail Apparel Group. This small group is tasked with driving the strategic direction and long-term vision of the business.

Tell us about your career journey and how you got started in retail property?

While still studying at University, I landed my first property role as Casual Mall Leasing Manager at Carlingford Court Shopping Centre for Lendlease. Excited to work for such a diverse company that had, at the time, one of the largest retail portfolios in Australia, the role allowed me to learn and appreciate retail and shopping centres. I also found I really enjoyed dealing with people every day and, more importantly, found an affinity and love for closing deals.

Under the guidance of some well-known, and notable industry leaders, I was presented with some great opportunities to further my career at Lendlease. After some time, this led to me joining GPT in retail leasing.

After about five years working on the landlord side of the fence, I changed direction and joined Retail Apparel Group (RAG) in 2007 to lead the leasing function under the direction of the co-founder of the business, Stephen Leibowitz.

When I started at RAG, the property and leasing team comprised entirely of just me and 100 retail stores. During the past 17 years, we have grown the store network to almost 600, and our property and leasing team has also grown to 13 members.

The time I have had with RAG has provided the foundations for me to gain a wealth of experience within my property role, the retail industry and broader management of our business. The long and winding journey to 600 stores had allowed me the privilege of seeing so much of Australia and has forged many lifelong friendships and connections.

What do you love about retail?

I am deeply passionate about the dynamic nature of the retail property industry and retail industry in general. I find the ever-evolving environment of bricks-and-mortar retail both challenging and exciting, especially as shopping centres continue to transform to meet the needs of modern consumers. I admire the ability of our landlord partners to adapt physical retail spaces to align with changing consumer behaviours to ensure they remain relevant, vibrant and often visited.

I am also fascinated by the rapid emergence and growth of online shopping. The constantly shifting landscape of e-commerce and endless new retail trends excite me as do the platforms and tech that allow us to engage in retail even more.

I love how retailers adapt and evolve. I am interested to see the ones that thrive and the ones that get left behind.

The people in our industry are also one of the reasons I love retail. In the retail leasing world, people are outgoing, fun, friendly and very social. There are so many characters in our game and there is rarely a dull moment. Many of my lifelong friendships are from the retail industry.

What do you think are the key elements of a successful retail business?

A key to retail success is staying relevant to your customer. Providing innovative and relevant shopping experiences both in store and online is critical to retaining and gaining new customers. We often talk about the importance of not growing old with your customer.

While product is our hero, content is also critical in this endeavour to remain relevant. We have our own studio on site at head office, the speed and creation of content moves so fast these days and RAG has a great sense of urgency around ensuring we continue to look world-class in all channels of the business.

Tell us about your company’s growth and expansion plans?

We plan to continue expanding our brands and investing in existing brands. With AXL & CO by Connor, we have the potential to open more than 20 new stores annually. Many of our brands are focused on optimising their store sizes, allowing us to implement unique,world-class fitouts tailored to each brand.

Post-COVID, we redesigned fit-out concepts for four of our six brands and are now embarking on a new design for our largest and most successful brand, Connor. This ensures that all six brands will see significant capital investment to facilitate upgrades in store appearance, once again highlighting our commitment to staying relevant to our customers.

In addition to growth in the Australian market, we are currently very active in New Zealand and are embarking on a growth strategy that will see our store network grow significantly in that market.

What are some of the trends you are seeing in the industry?

The demand from retailers to take larger retail footprints continues to be a trend. For RAG, our growth in footprint size was to provide for a more pleasant shopping experience, as well as the ability to accommodate a larger stock holding on site. We have invested significantly in purpose built storerooms within our retail footprint that allows us to service our customers more efficiently.

Another trend is the digitalisation of retail fitouts. There is much discussion around the increase in fitout and building costs, exacerbated with the trend towards digital screens used for both key messages and content.

A not so new trend in the industry is the continued growing importance of having a cohesive and well-executed omnichannel delivery, this ultimately facilitates getting product to the customer faster and in a manner that is becoming more common and therefore expected by our customers.

What are some of the tools that influence your decision-making?

With the significant growth of online and CRM tools, we have broader visibility of our customer, how they shop and, of course, where they are shopping from. The extent of this highly valuable and relevant data that is at our disposal has enabled us to be extremely strategic in the launch of our latest brand AXL & CO by Connor. We can draw upon various data sets from both our online and retail stores across all our existing brands. Investment in developing bespoke reporting tools enable us to dissect the data quite quickly, which of course points us in the direction of where we are best placed to open stores.

How important is sustainability and ESG in your company’s strategy?

RAG is aware of the impact the apparel industry has on our planet and we are committed to making positive change.

Our Environmental Strategy is a commitment to four long-term goals that aim to address the biggest environmental challenges across our supply chain and the lifecycle of our products, starting at the fields where our cotton is grown to how garments are disposed of.

As with most businesses, we are on the journey. It’s going to be a long one that won’t be without its challenges, but it’s something I am personally very passionate about. We consider the environment in all decisions made within our business; everything from zero product to landfill through to the recycling of store fit-outs and most recently the installation of solar at head office to reduce our carbon footprint.

What are the opportunities and challenges facing the industry?

Changes in consumer expectations will remain a challenge for retailers, this concept of instant gratification, customers wanting products instantly will continue to push retailers to invest and develop their IT infrastructure to support these new shopping habits.

Click & Collect within an hour and ship from store are just some of the advancements that are required to meet the growing demands of customers. As traffic into centres continues to be a challenge, we welcome retailers continuing to evolve how the distribution channels evolve.

There is no doubt that Amazon and its shipping model has got retailers thinking… How that is integrated into a business in a profitable manner will be the big challenge.

Advice for someone on the landlord side looking to move across to retail?

You will never look back!

I was very fortunate to land in a business with deep family roots. Despite our growth and changes, we have preserved a strong family culture. We continue to treat every store as if it was our only store, that level of ownership in how we treat the business maintains a lasting sense of ownership.

For young and ambitious individuals, I would recommend seeking out a great retail business with a similar approach.

This profile featuring Nicole Lazarou forms part of a special feature published in the latest issue of SCN magazine.