gazine covering the dance and electronic music industry, has recommended them for cold-weather festivals, and, fittingly, in 2016, they were the official boot at Sundance Film Festival in Utah. Either Blundstone is one of those rare apparel brands that seems to hold universal appeal, or it has an extremely hard-working PR department.  If you ask Blundstone CEO Steve Gunn, the answer, of course, is both.  In fact, Gunn believes this mixture of strategy and sheer luck is how the brand has managed to survive more or less in its current form for the last 150 years.  “I talk a lot about luck, and I’m not trying to be stupidly humble or anything like that,” he told Inside Retail recently.  “I think the reality is that there’s a lot of things that can knock you out in the world, and to dodge them along the way probably did take some skill – but certainly some things went our way.”  Blundstone CEO Steve Gunn has guided the brand to international growth. Image: Supplied Family ownership The business was founded by John and Eliza Blundstone in Hobart in 1870, when Tasmania was still a British colony. They sold work and leisure boots for men, women and children and were one of 20 manufacturers contracted to supply boots to Aussie troops during World War I.  When the Great Depression hit, Blundstone was acquired by another long-running family-owned boot business in Tasmania, and the descendants of that family, the Cuthbertsons, still own Blundstone today.  This family ownership is one reason Gunn believes the business has been able to evolve over the years. “We don’t have shareholders that are wanting instant results. We don’t have to go to meetings once a year and look good – we’re able to think long term,” he said.  Another reason is the product Blundstone sells. The brand launched its now-iconic slip-on Chelsea boot design in the 1960s, but unlike polyester pants and beehive hairdos, Chelsea boots have never really gone out of style. “There’s got to be something about your product that allows it to be resilient,” Gunn said.  “We work tirelessly on making the product as good as it can be, and that means value for money, comfort, appearance, currency – as in it’s what people want to wear today. We put a lot of effort into that brand management.” But even with the right product and the right owners, Blundstone may never have become the global phenomenon it is today if not for a stroke of luck in the late 1990s.  ‘At the bottom of the world’ For decades, international expansion had mostly been driven by overseas tourists falling in love with the boots while travelling around Australia and telling their friends about the brand when they returned home. But with the arrival of the internet, Blundstone was suddenly able to market itself around the world. “It just happened at exactly the right time,” Gunn said. “We’ve done some things to promote and maximise our word-of-mouth advantage, but if the internet didn’t exist, we would still potentially be a small brand at the bottom of the world struggling to communicate.”  A few years later, in 2007, Blundstone moved production offshore, which allowed it to enter new markets with more competitive pricing. Part strategy, part luck.  Today, Blundstone sells more than 2.7 million boots a year and has a presence in more than 70 countries worldwide. Outside of Australia and New Zealand, the brand’s top markets are Canada, Israel, Italy and the US, where sales have been growing around 66 per cent a year for the past three years.  Gunn attributes the recent uplift to the launch of women’s boots five years ago. Blundstone had previously offered unisex boots, but the CEO admits they were essentially made for men. Now that women can buy boots designed for them, they account for more than 50 per cent of sales, up from around 10 per cent in the early 2000s. “The opportunity was always there, but we did everything we could to get in the way of it for a while,” Gunn joked. “In more recent times we’ve actually been able to engage the female consumer.” Blundstone now sells more than 2.7 million boots a year. Image: Supplied Being retail savvy In Australia and New Zealand, Blundstone is mostly known as a workwear brand, but overseas, the lifestyle range gets more traction. Coming up with a cohesive communication strategy is difficult. “We’ve had conversations about whether to highlight the work and safety elements of business because we only have one voice to customer, and every time we talk about that, we are missing out on the opportunity to talk about something else,” Gunn said. But over time, he has come to view the workwear range as an important differentiator and link to the brand’s 150-year history.  In Australia, New Zealand and the US, where Blundstone distributes products itself, the workwear and lifestyle ranges are promoted side-by-side on social media. The upshot is that some workwear customers have become aware of the brand’s fashion offering and vice versa.  While Blundstone’s direct-to-consumer online business is growing, Gunn said the brand still sees itself as something of a reluctant retailer. That is partly because the board witnessed other brands head down the retail route and end up in the hands of new owners because they couldn’t handle the investment required. It’s also because the brand has worked with some of its retail partners for decades and felt it would be disloyal to compete with them. But a few years ago, some retail partners in the US urged Blundstone to offer its full range online, so customers wouldn’t be disappointed if they couldn’t find a particular product for sale. It works slightly differently in Australia, where Blundstone only offers its lifestyle range online.  “Although we now know we are retailers and we’re not looking to get out of it, we would still think of ourselves somewhat as reluctant retailers, and we’re still developing the skills in that space,” Gunn said. “Inside the business, we’re still talking about the fact that we need to become more retail savvy.” It’s a fine line, however. Not having a large retail store network may be one of the key reasons the business has survived for 150 years. “In the modern world of malls and shopping centres, the lot of a retailer is tough, and I don’t know if we would have been able to avoid being drawn into that had we taken the view that we wanted to get some extra margin by being our own retailer,” Gunn said.  “It wouldn’t have been a decision for that reason, but looking back on it, I think it would have done us some favours.” For now, the brand is testing the water by opening pop-up shops with its retail partners. Before Covid-19 hit, the newest Blundstone pop-up in Brooklyn was performing well, and the brand had plans to open more pop-ups in the US in 2020.   “I don’t think the idea has disappeared, but it may have had a one-year hiatus,” Gunn said. “I think we’ll be back at it.” This story first appeared in the November 2020 issue of Inside Retail Magazine.