First UCLA Clothing store opens in Australia

The first UCLA clothing store in Australia opened last month, as part of a growing effort to market UCLA Clothing as an international fashion brand.

UCLA Clothing is produced by Ideal Europe, a U.K.-based clothing company under a licensing contract with Associated
Students UCLA. Ideal Europe has UCLA brand distribution rights for Europe, India, and the Middle East as well. ASUCLA has been working with them since 2007.

The Australian store opened in Melbourne on the same day as more than 200 other retailers and eateries in a $1.2 billion shopping center.

International buyers are interested in UCLA Clothing because it is fashionable and indicative of the Southern California college lifestyle, not because they have a personal connection to the school like domestic buyers, said Cynthia Holmes, ASUCLA licensing director in an interview in November.

Ideal Europe has been discussing expanding to Australia with ASUCLA for over a year, said Holmes. The company brought the proposal to ASUCLA, although the association had been actively pushing Ideal Europe to expand into additional markets, she said.

She added ASUCLA paid no direct costs in order to make this expansion happen.

Holmes said ASUCLA licensing has not yet determined what percent it will receive of the revenue from all the UCLA Clothing sales in Australia because Australia was a market ASUCLA was very interested in entering and did not want to create any challenges for Ideal Europe’s doing so.

Among other enterprises, ASUCLA earns revenue from licensing, which comes from license contracts with Ideal Europe as well as clothing companies in China, Japan and multiple Scandinavian countries.

In the past five years ASUCLA licensing revenue has been increasing.

So far in the current school year, ASUCLA has earned $402,000 in licensing revenues.

However, this trend of rising revenues has not been without dips. The current figure is about $25,000 less than the amount of revenues ASUCLA earned by this time last year.

Richard Delia, ASUCLA financial director, said that the lower revenue this year was in part because of its loss of a licensing contract with a clothing company in Korea and a dip in revenues from a clothing company in
China.

The new UCLA apparel store in Australia was well received and many people were tweeting about UCLA Clothing on the day of the store’s opening with tweet tags like #calilife, #lalife and #UCLA, said Jo Evendon, UCLA Clothing creative manager.

She added that on the day of the store’s opening two hired models dressed in UCLA Clothing walked and biked around
Melbourne handing out UCLA foam fingers and postcards to promote the store.

Interior decoration of the Melbourne UCLA store is designed to feel like the inside of a sporting facility or gymnasium, she
said.

Nayana Khurana, a first-year student at the University of Melbourne, said she visited the Melbourne UCLA store a few weeks after its opening.

“I thought that it was a bit odd having a (UCLA) store in Melbourne,” Khurana said. “It made me think that UCLA was a big branded well-known school.”

She added that the store sold a lot of sporting attire which gave her the impression that UCLA was a university that centered on athletics.

Khurana said she saw people in Melbourne wearing UCLA Clothing and that when she visited the store she overheard people saying they were happily surprised by the store’s opening.

Holmes said she hopes that the Melbourne UCLA store is successful and that she hopes additional UCLA stores will be developed in Australia.

The international UCLA Clothing brand will be available at the Ackerman Student Store for three weeks at the end of the month.

This will be the second time Ideal Europe’s UCLA Clothing has been available at the student store. It was offered for the first time for a few weeks during fall quarter.

“Not everybody knows that UCLA stores is occurring on an international basis,” Holmes said. “It’s nice to bring it in not just for the product development but also for the story of it.”