front of him was not incremental growth, but the reset of a business built for pandemic velocity, suddenly needing to relearn restraint without losing relevance. “The difficult truth I had to confront was that The Iconic had over-expanded based on an expectation of continued COVID-level growth,” Calmes told Inside Retail ahead of being named one of our Top 50 People in E-Commerce. “This led to an unsustainable cost base that couldn’t withstand the industry’s return to store and a more moderate long-term growth trajectory.” The reset that followed was neither cosmetic nor conservative. Calmes inherited a business facing intensified competition from both domestic players strengthening their e-commerce propositions and international operators accelerating investment into Australia and New Zealand. Yet he saw something else too: a platform with latent power. Founded in 2011, The Iconic now serves 2.2 million active customers across ANZ, positioning itself not just as a retailer but as a fashion and lifestyle platform engineered around what it calls a “beyond-the-fitting-room” experience. That framing matters as it underpins how Calmes thinks about growth, loyalty, logistics and technology as a single operating system, rather than disconnected levers. The last 18 months have been defined by discipline, but not austerity. Calmes filtered every investment through a singular question: does it build customer lifetime value? “Everything we do is rooted in our two strategic pillars, offering our customers the best and most inspiring fashion and lifestyle assortment, coupled with a ‘beyond-the-fitting-room’ customer experience that ensures their continued engagement,” he said. From 2023 to 2025, The Iconic invested in streamlining fulfilment operations, including a major upgrade to its warehouse management system to reduce cost while increasing delivery speed. Six new labels were added to its own-brand portfolio. The business launched its masterbrand campaign Got You Looking and rolled out its first loyalty program, The Iconic “Front Row”, co-designed with more than 50,000 customers and scaled to two million users within two weeks. Delivery became the most visible proof point of the reset. Long renowned for its three-hour service in Sydney metro, Calmes turned his attention to what he calls “thinking about our customers past the Sydney postcodes”. In 2025, The Iconic reduced Melbourne free standard delivery times by more than 50 per cent, shifting from four days to one-to-two days. In New Zealand metro areas, orders moved from four-to-five days to next-day delivery.  Behind the scenes, the operational philosophy is increasingly shaped by technology, but with a deliberate human counterweight. AI, for Calmes, is not a replacement layer but an amplifier. “My belief is that technology, data, and AI should enhance the team’s speed and intelligence, always in conjunction with human judgment, curiosity, and empathy,” he said. “This principle is so vital that it has been codified as one of The Iconic’s new five core principles: ‘be human, lead with tech.’” In 2025, The Iconic rolled out Nexus, its secure internal AI assistant, now embedded across research, ideation, data synthesis, workflow automation and code support. But Calmes is explicit on his discouragement of blind trust. “I expect the team to apply critical judgment, sense-check AI outputs, and maintain strict discipline around privacy, security and upholding our brand voice,” he said.  This balance of speed without erosion of thinking sits at the heart of Calmes’ leadership model. After 25 years across telecoms, retail and e-commerce, including growing designer footwear label Lamoda, his focus is no longer solely financial. “My focus is on achieving balance between building a financially strong company with principles that go beyond the red and black of financial numbers,” he said. “I am acutely aware of the impact our industry has on the environment and the position I am in as one of the largest e-comm businesses in ANZ to influence change.” That sense of stewardship now extends beyond The Iconic’s walls. Calmes has become a visible voice in the Australian retail debate, supporting campaigns such as News Corp’s Back Australia initiative, championing local designers through New Zealand Fashion Week partnerships, and delivering a keynote at NORA’s Future of Retail Platforms ANZ Summit in May 2025 outlining The Iconic’s evolution from a pure B2C retailer into a B2B platform business. “What hasn’t changed is my belief that great people build great businesses,” he said. “Creating the conditions for a strong team’s aligned purpose has always been central to how I lead.”  Calmes’ recalibration of The Iconic is not a defensive pivot but a structural upgrade, where trust, speed, technology and humanity are not trade-offs, but co-dependencies. And in that synthesis, Rather than rewriting a recovery story, The Iconic is shaping a platform one. Download Inside Retail’s Top 50 People in E-Commerce, presented by Australia Post, in full here.