The Client
Oroton is Australia's oldest luxury fashion company, founded in Sydney in 1938 by Boyd Lane. For decades, the brand was synonymous with quality leather goods and its iconic woven metallic mesh evening bags — a staple of Australian women's wardrobes and a marker of accessible luxury. By the 2010s, however, the brand had lost its way: declining sales, over-reliance on discounting, a failed partnership with Gap Australia, and an outdated design approach had eroded both relevance and profitability. In November 2017, Oroton entered voluntary administration, reporting a $14.2 million loss. In 2018, a former board member acquired the company for approximately $25 million, appointed a new marketing director tasked with transforming the brand, and set about rebuilding it from the ground up.
The Challenge
Oroton had heritage, craftsmanship, and an emotional connection with Australian consumers that decades of mismanagement hadn't entirely extinguished. What it lacked was a contemporary brand strategy that could translate those latent assets into a credible, differentiated luxury position for a new generation.The brand was trapped in a single category — leather bags and accessories — in a market that had fundamentally changed around it. New competitors had emerged with digitally-native models and modern positioning. The retail landscape had shifted toward experiential and omnichannel. And consumer expectations of what a luxury brand should offer had expanded well beyond product.The strategic question wasn't just how to fix the brand. It was how to expand the brand's field of influence beyond its traditional category — without losing the heritage and craftsmanship credentials that made it Oroton
Our Approach
SBP was engaged to develop the brand strategy that would underpin Oroton's next chapter and to apply Brand Field Thinking to identify the trajectory the brand could credibly follow.The brand strategy work began with competitive mapping of the Australian accessible luxury landscape, customer research to understand who the modern Oroton customer was (and who she could become), and a brand audit to identify which brand assets were genuinely distinctive and which were merely nostalgic.Strategic conversations with the leadership team tested the tension at the heart of the brief — heritage versus modernity — and established that the brand's craftsmanship credentials and Australian provenance were non-negotiable foundations, not constraints.The strategy was built around a repositioning of Oroton from a leather accessories brand to a modern luxury lifestyle brand — one that honoured 80 years of heritage while redefining what that heritage meant for a contemporary audience. Purpose, ambition, positioning, and strategic trajectory were articulated as a board-ready framework with clear commercial rationale.We applied brand architecture thinking to map Oroton's brand influence and identify where the brand could credibly extend beyond accessories. Three adjacent fields were identified and prioritised: ready-to-wear apparel (the most immediate and commercially significant extension), reimagined retail experiences (stores as lifestyle destinations rather than transactional environments), and cultural community-building (brand as curator and convener, not just retailer). Each field was assessed for strategic fit, customer demand, and commercial potential — and a sequenced entry roadmap was developed, with ready-to-wear as the first field extension and experiential retail as the second.
What We Delivered
A complete brand strategy — purpose, ambition, positioning, trajectory, and strategic moves — providing the strategic foundation for Oroton's transformation. A Brand Field analysis mapping the brand's current influence and three identified growth territories beyond the core accessories category. A sequenced roadmap with ready-to-wear as the priority entry point, including market positioning, brand strategy principles, and launch recommendations. Strategic direction for a new concept store format that would express the expanded brand beyond traditional retail.
The Outcome
The brand strategy and trajectory roadmap provided the strategic architecture for what has become one of Australia's most remarkable brand turnarounds. Oroton launched its first ready-to-wear collection in 2019 — the brand's first apparel line in its 80-year history — followed by a complete visual identity reimagining in 2020 and its debut runway show at Australian Fashion Week in 2021. The experiential retail strategy took shape with the Paddington concept store in 2022 — designed as a "living moodboard" blending fashion, art, and community rather than a conventional retail space — and continued with the Double Bay boutique in 2025 and ongoing store network investment.The numbers reflect the transformation. From a $14.2 million loss before administration, Oroton rebuilt to $97 million in revenue by FY22 (up 22%), then $115 million by FY23 (up a further 18%) with operating profit doubled. By FY24, total revenue had reached approximately $124 million. The apparel strategy alone drove 57% sales growth in its first full year, and the brand has expanded to close to 50 stores and concessions across Australia and Malaysia. Oroton didn't just recover. It became a fundamentally different — and fundamentally larger — brand, competing in fields it had never previously occupied, grounded in a strategy that turned heritage from a liability into the platform for expansion.
"There was as much value in the process as there was in the final outcome.
We were able for the first time, to understand the critical brand issues and align on them in the strategic challenge workshops and come to a consensus quickly."
Prue Thomas, Marketing Director
