Next January, Don Robertson and Matilda Murray, the married co-owners of Stax, will move from their warehouse in Sydney’s Banksmeadow into a bigger one next door, 12 times the size. It’s the company’s fourth warehouse in eight years.
“We started in my mum’s spare room,” says Robertson, 33. “And then [we moved to] Til’s dad’s lounge room, and then we got storage units [in Perth], and then we moved to Sydney. And the only storage unit we could afford in Sydney didn’t have electricity.” Everyone in Australia has a March 23, 2020 story: everyone can tell you what they were doing, and then, swiftly, what they were not doing, when the then-prime minister Scott Morrisonto flatten the curve of COVID-19 infections. That day, Robertson and Murray had just spent their life savings to shoot a campaign for a new collection called Premium Seamless V2.
The couple continued to send out orders as they came through, going to their office because they were the only two there anyway. “It was surreal,” says Murray. “Every day, the Australia Post person would come, and every day, we would ask, ‘Are you coming back tomorrow?’”Eight weeks later, the container was found. They couldn’t stage the influencer campaign they’d planned on, so Murray stepped in and modelled the collection. Robertson took the photographs.
What Robertson wanted to do was own a supplement store – whey protein powder, creatine, that sort of thing. He’d already owned one called Muscle Stax, which was in a gym, and when the gym shut down the liquidators seized everything inside, including all his inventory. This presale model was Robertson’s saving grace, and allowed him some certainty and cash flow. It is not new – indeed it is how the modern fashion industry was created, with runway shows that would gain well-to-do patrons’ attention, and then their orders. It is how Moda Operandi, the online retailer founded in 2010, operates, by showing clients designers’ collections and offering presale to cut down on waste.
If you are wondering how, exactly, a company that sells leggings turned over $30 million in revenue this year, you are asking a great question. They are minimalist, with just a small Stax logo at the ankle and hip. There is nothing, really, to distinguish them from the thousands of other leggings on the market. For Robertson: “It’s all about the fabric.”
One week, he applied for 36 credit cards and destroyed his credit rating, making it close to impossible to get a bank loan or external funding. But the business was growing, and in Sydney, they employed their first staff member, in customer service. “I would be sitting next to her, doing my recruitment job, while she was doing my dream job, customer service at Stax.”When the site was pulling in $500 of orders a day, Murray made the leap. She is now the company’s brand manager.
These days, Robertson and Murray do everything together, as they’ve done pretty much since the moment they met. They married in January and after nearly two years of pandemic restrictions and border closures, opted for a simple ceremony, just the two of them. Murray wore a white strapless gown with a feathered hem. When they’d said “I do”, she changed back into her Stax hoodie for dinner at a restaurant at Crown Sydney.
Each Stax collection “tells a story”, he says, though mostly this story is about the campaign the company makes to promote them: runway shows and mini-movies starring influencers. The clothes are almost identical from each collection to the next.This year, Stax opened its first retail stores in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. More are on the way, including Queensland, Los Angeles and London.