Dockers women’s is reintroducing itself to consumers as it hits retail floors this month.
Complete with new pants fits and more youthful tops, the relaunched fall collection is the product of new management and a yearlong makeover.
“It’s a little bit more stylish than you would think about Dockers in the past,” said Barbara Gollert, vice president of merchandising and design for Dockers women’s.
A veteran of Dockers’ parent company Levi Strauss & Co. for more than 25 years, Gollert has held various product leadership roles, including oversight of the brand’s premium denim lines. She joined Dockers last summer. Along with Dockers brand president John Goodman, she is half of the team spearheading the campaign to revolutionize the label’s women’s business.
Fall is the first time their full efforts are being realized, though more efficient business practices and some design tweaks have already increased sales.
Dockers’ women’s line now makes up 22 percent of sales, compared with 18 percent last year. Macy’s is carrying an exclusive Dockers Collection line starting this fall, and Kohl’s has increased its orders by 50 percent.
Kevin Mansell, president of Kohl’s Department Stores, attributes the retailer’s sales growth this year partially to its relationship with Dockers. “It is clear the customer is responding to our merchandise offerings,” Mansell said. “The women’s Dockers business, driven by new products in both fashion and wardrobe fundamentals, was a lead category and significantly outpaced the year-to-date company comp-store increase.”
Perhaps the ultimate measure of success is that fashion editorial coverage is up 40 percent year-to-date from last year, according to John Ordona, director of convergence marketing at Dockers.
“[The female customer] trusts us because she knows us from her husband, her guy, but now she needs to trust us for herself,” Goodman said. “We want to see how much further we can take women’s.”
With his background in women’s “fixer-uppers,” Goodman recognized the potential to build women’s strength in a men’s-driven company when he arrived at Dockers a year ago.
Prior to joining Dockers, Goodman helped reinvent Kmart’s apparel brands across all consumer segments as Kmart Corp.’s senior vice president and chief apparel and home officer, and led the development of strategies for Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy Outlet as Gap Inc.’s senior vice president of merchandising, planning, production and distribution.
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“We were running Dockers like a men’s business,” Goodman said. “Men’s doesn’t move as fast. It’s much more a basics business, core khaki replenishment. In women’s, you must be up to the times — you’ve got to be fast and on the trend. You don’t have to be beyond the trend, but have to be on the trend.”
Turnaround time was one of the first things the company changed, by stocking fabrics and staying on top of which pieces are selling. Where it once took six to nine months, it now takes less than two months.
The design itself was another key change. “We’d had the same five fits for five years,” Goodman said. “A lot had happened in women’s in the meantime.”
Gollert and her design team spent the last year tweaking the fit. She thinks they’ve perfected the three new fits — Original, Favorite and Ideal — but as fashions change, the fits will adapt in smalls ways to reflect that. Having great fits and maintaining some consistency in them is key to Dockers, which has always relied on repeat purchases. The bottoms wholesale for $15 to $22.
This summer, Dockers got a new head women’s designer, a spot that was vacated in January. Jean Benz, a Tommy Bahama veteran, will now lead the team.
“Women’s thrives on change, so you need a team that thrives off that,” Gollert said. “Men’s is more programmed and systematic.”
Dockers also reclaimed its women’s shirt license from Kellwood Co. “The tops were out of New York, and bottoms were out of San Francisco,” Goodman said. “It’s not tops and bottoms; it’s Dockers.”
This fall produces the first full San Francisco-born tops line since the company bought back the license. The shirts have a more youthful, trendy look and better coordinate with the bottoms, according to Gollert. The tops wholesale for $10 to $28.
A new ad campaign will usher in the line, upping ad spending, though the company would not provide specifics. The brand did not have specific women’s advertising in 2005. Unlike last year’s efforts to combine the male and female Dockers’ customer into one narrative, this year’s campaign lets “women stand alone,” Gollert said. Ads for the campaign will launch in fall issues of magazines such as People, Glamour and O, The Oprah Magazine.