In the first-half of last year, shoe-brand Wittner, founded in 1912, entered voluntary administration. Now just a little over a year later, their main competitor, founded in 1892, Betts, has followed suit.
Between them, that's well over two centuries of history, five generations of the same family running Betts alone, and two brands that Australians grew up buying school shoes and going-out shoes from in equal measure. Both are now closing stores, cutting headcount and fighting for a future that looks nothing like their past.
I keep hearing the same explanation for both collapses: rising rent, rising wages, a consumer pulling back on discretionary spend. All of that is true. Betts' administrator pointed to falling foot traffic and retail conditions that were, in their words, not sustainable. Wittner's own statement cited occupancy costs and supply chain pressure. Both brands went down fighting a macro environment that's been brutal on Australian retail more broadly, with Jeanswest, Glue, Lincraft, Barbeques Galore and A.H. Beard all falling in the same bleak bucket.
That's the official version we keep hearing, and it isn't wrong. It just doesn’t explain to me why some brands manage to keep fighting the good fight, and others don’t endure.
Every retailer is facing the same rent and supply chain increases and the same nervous customers right now. Taxes, tariffs, interest rate increases… they take no hostages when it comes to consumer confidence.
But not every brand is struggling.
In my role, I get to speak to retailers big and small, independent and corporate, and it seems that it’s not size or budget or number of years in business that is keeping them afloat right now.
So the question worth asking isn't how long these economic conditions will continue… it’s whether your brand has the substance that’s needed to weather this storm?
A brand that gives its customer a real reason to choose it, one that has nothing to do with which shopping centre it's in or what's on sale that week, has something to trade on when the environment tightens. It can hold its margin. It can hold its customer. A brand running on recognition or historical presence alone has no such buffer, because brand awareness was never the thing keeping the customer loyal in the first place. It was just the thing that made the brand easy to remember while something else – price, habit, convenience – did the actual work of the sale.
Betts seemed to sense this coming. In October 2025 it relaunched under a repositioning that narrowed its focus and leaned into its heritage rather than away from it. Nine months later, it was in administration.
That's a short runway, and I don't think the timeline alone tells us the strategy failed. The real question is whether this was a genuine rebuild of what the brand stood for, with proof a customer could feel in store and online, or a repositioning in aesthetics alone? Pretty doesn’t trump purpose in this economy, and that’s a fact that a market under pressure shows again and again.
I say this to our partners constantly, and I'll keep saying it because it's becoming more true, not less: purpose and brand storytelling aren't a soft add-on layered over the commercial strategy. In a market this tight, they're one of the last real levers left to pull. Everyone is fighting for the same shrinking pool of discretionary spend, and the brands winning that fight are the ones giving their customer an actual reason to show up, not just a name they recognise from childhood. Whether that's Patagonia and their bold sustainability ethos, Bonds repositioning around body diversity and comfort or R.M Williams functional, forever quality that customers can actually feel…it’s something deeper that prevails beyond just time-in-market.
Betts and Wittner had the age, the name recognition and the customer goodwill that most brands spend decades trying to buy. Neither had enough left over to survive a hard year, and that’s a very sobering fact. Awareness or heritage isn’t enough now.
If your brand has real history behind it, treat that as a starting point worth building on, not a strategy that's already doing the work for you. History bought these two brands time. It didn't buy them a future.
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