Last night we donned our penguin suits again for the second awards night in as many months, this time for the National Retail Awards.
AND WE WON (again)!
That’s right, Citizen Wolf took out the coveted ‘Innovation Champion of the Year’ award for our tech stack that makes tailoring at scale both simple and viable.
“The array of finalists in the National Retail Awards this year demonstrated that, regardless of size, retailers were fighting back against the prevailing economic headwinds to not only survive but thrive.” - Dominique Lamb, CEO National Retail Association
After 3.5 years of blood, mucho sweat and more than a few tears this award feels sweet indeed. And considering we’re not from a retail background, it’s pretty crazy to have our name up in lights and celebrated alongside local heavy hitters like Bonds, Appliances Online, Lush and Dymocks.
Especially because it's tough times indeed in physical retail, what some are describing as a 'retail apocalypse'.
Here in Australia we've lost Toys'R'Us, Roger David and Laura Ashley among many more. In the UK, the Arcadia empire is on the verge of being broken up in order to sell brands like Topshop individually. Barneys New York, the city’s famous fashion emporium has recently filed for bankruptcy. And even ASOS is faltering with repeated profit warnings and a collapsing share price.
And it's only going to get worse. Over the next five years, one in four malls in the USA is projected to close according to Credit Suisse.
Since we began Citizen Wolf we’ve been swimming against the tide. Everyone in the industry told us that it simply couldn’t be done on the supply side, and even if we could solve that, no one would pay for a made-to-measure Tee.
'They' also said the same thing about the car ("the price will never be sufficiently low"), liquid nail polish (“a strange and unique fad") and movies with dialogue ("Talking doesn't belong in pictures").
So this award goes out to those Negative Nancys who catalysed the naive questions that led us to create the future of fashion today.
Thank you for not believing in us.