Customised apparel business ONTHEGO (OTG) has teased a strategic investment round in the new financial year as well as further retail partnerships on the horizon, with the acquisition of a manufacturing plant Zems Apparel in Wetherill Park, New South Wales.
The plant will allow OTG to expand its footprint, and enable the “highest quality customised offerings in record delivery times”, according to OTG chief executive Mick Spencer.
According to Spencer, this acquisition was the next step for the business following the significant investment made by Wesfarmers’ Workwear Group in 2018.
“The company [is] pursuing an aggressive twofold investment strategy in technology development and analogous capability acquisition in furthering our leading customer experience [of] designing products easy, and having them delivered quick,” Spencer said.
“Zems will provide us a bolt on capability that will enable us to leverage our significant investments to date in our technology for mass customisation scale.”
As part of the acquisition, Zems has been re-branded as ‘OTG Labs’ and founder Mark Harris will lead OTG’s Web2Print facility.
“OTG’s founding and vision is what first attracted me, [and] after meeting the team I knew my visions of this industry could be achieved,” Harris said.
“I’m excited to join the OTG team and have my skill set taken to the next level with what is to come with this company.”
OTG previously told Inside Retail it planned to expand its business into Southeast Asia and New Zealand in the short term, and the UK, Europe, or North American market as long term goals.
“The challenge is also that we’ve got customers coming in from everywhere,” Spencer told Inside Retail.
“We want to be very planned in our outbound approach because we still have a lot of wood to chop in Australia, but we want to start to take the innovation to the next phase overseas.”
A customer can be anywhere, said Spencer, as people all over the world want to create uniforms for their business, and will do it online because the uniform industry has been slow to react to the growing expectations for faster and better service driven by customers, creating a global opportunity for the business.
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