Homewares brand Dan300 has opened a retail venture as part of the new O’Connell Street Merchants retail collective at Newtown in Sydney.
The store features a group of designers from a range of different product categories, each with their own space to merchandise their products.
The Dan300 Group director and designer, Dani Rosen, says the initiative gives her the opportunity to move into retail in a financially viable way.
“I do such a huge range of product… it’s an opportunity to have everything in the one place at the one time,” she says. “The whole thing of seeing product in real life still exists – I don’t think that will ever change, I just think people will change how they do it [so] instead of opening a shop which is just Dan300 I’m in a collective because having an entire shop of just Dan300 is just too big a financial risk, too expensive. At the end of the day it is just too expensive in Sydney to have a whole shop on your own with one label unless you’re a big company.”
Being part of O’Connell Street Merchants also gives Rosen the opportunity to see first-hand what consumers think of her products. She can also trial some designs in store to see if they’re worth wholesaling on a larger scale.
“I was really interested to see what people looked at and I found it really interesting. It was different to what I thought it would be, so it gets you in touch with the customer and literally what they want, the questions they ask, what they initially walk in and pick up and what they end up purchasing – two different things.”
The complete Dan300 range is available at the store as well as one-off, bespoke pieces. O’Connell Street Merchants is on level one of an iconic warehouse building, a café is on the ground level.
