If the Apple store were a womenswear boutique, it would be Henne. The Australian fashion label delivers a unique in-store retail experience. Rather than stocking clothing in multiple sizes on shelves or racks for customers to try on and purchase, “Everything that you see on display is just for display,” Nadia Bartel, Henne’s director, told Inside Retail. Instead of serving themselves, customers are greeted by a dedicated stock controller, who floats over with an iPad whenever someone enter
ters the store and proceeds to guide them through an elevated journey of discovering the brand’s products. A runner waits at the ready to collect each customer’s selections from the stock room — ensuring fresh garments await their try-on in the change room.
“It’s just the way I like to shop. I love being guided through the pieces. I don’t like when there’s too many items on the rack, I feel like that can be overwhelming,” Bartel said.
Henne was founded in 2019 by Bartel, her sister Michelle Ring and friend Laura Broque. The brand delivers a contemporary approach to mindful apparel, balancing design innovation with quintessential ready-to-wear styles.
The Henne team now has a team of over 20 staff and two retail stores – its most recent in the heart of Sydney’s Paddington Fiveways precinct and its original Greville Street Melbourne flagship store.
“It’s a personalized experience and we wanted the customer to feel like they’re in a beautiful home when shopping in-store,” Bartel said.
Providing a curated experience
The Henne approach to service is designed to make the customer comfortable. Clients booked into styling sessions are welcomed with a coffee, juice or champagne if they prefer — depending on the time of day. Fostering a comfortable, hospitable experience is important to Bartel “because some people do find that experience of shopping really daunting,” she said.
“Having less items on the rack was really kind of working towards that as well.”
Henne has a dedicated customer relations manager who is responsible for emailing and texting with customers and providing a bespoke brand experience.
“That’s all because of our stores, so we hope that when we open up more stores around Australia, we can share that experience with everyone as well,” Bartel said.
“Our main focus for creating this brand was to build confidence in women and make them feel empowered,” she said, noting that the brand’s name is Swedish for ‘her’.
Evolving with the customer
The Henne customer is everyone: “She has evolved over time and we’ve gotten a little bit older in our customer base, which is really nice, that’s just our customers growing with us as well,” Bartel said.
“From day one, it was important the quality was incredible, but I didn’t want that price point to reflect that. Every single thing that we do comes down to that, and we just don’t have much margin in our product.”
This is also the reason why the brand doesn’t sell its products on a wholesale basis.
“We go direct to consumer because we would rather give our customers a really high-quality product, and if that means that there’s less margin in there, we don’t mind. What we’re building, and the customer experience and the feeling they have wearing Henne, is literally the most important thing,” Bartel said.
“I think because we haven’t had wholesalers and stakeholders, we’ve been able to nurture that.”
The fashion connection
Bartel said that she and her sister had always wanted to start a brand but had no idea how to go about it. This led to them starting an online platform business called The Connection, a fashion retailer that sold a mix of Australian and international brands.
“We had the idea for Henne when we were going to all these showings for The Connection, and we realized brands were releasing so many styles all the time with so much wastage, and I could see that the consumer wasn’t really wanting those styles,” Bartel said.
She identified a gap in the market, as well as the problem of overconsumption.
“ I felt the customer was searching for more guidance about how to put an outfit together and create their uniform to feel empowered and confident in,” she added.
Bartel and Ring leveraged the engaged community and customer base they had garnered with The Connection to launch Henne with a limited range of base collections.
Six years later, the brand has expanded to provide a full closet, with statement pieces, suiting, eventwear and accessories.
Launching Henne on The Connection enabled Bartel and Ring to get a feel for what the customer wanted.
More to come
“When you’ve got a startup business, you want to do everything. And that’s probably one of the one of the big challenges — you’ve got all these ideas and you just want to do so much,” Bartel said.
In the last 12 months, the business has focused its energy on “what makes a big change and difference with the team we’ve got, and we are really focused on opening up retail stores around Australia,” Nadia said.
“We’ve got another space that we’re looking at in Sydney and Melbourne, that is moving quite fast. We love just building that connection with our customer in-store.
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