On the eve of the launch of the Australian Fashion Council National Manufacturing Strategy for Fashion and Textiles something clicked for me; a connection between future Australian manufacturing and a business I grew up watching be built by three men who started in a shed in Brompton, South Australia.
That business was Ace Shopfitters. And the lessons it (and similar businesses) offers for fashion manufacturing may be more relevant than anyone has yet articulated.
A Business Built Without a Blueprint
Ace Shopfitters (Nominee) Pty Ltd, based in Brompton in Adelaide’s inner-western industrial corridor, grew from a small shopfitting operation in the 1970s into a company of 160 employees. Over nearly five decades it survived economic downturns, industry restructuring, and the gradual erosion of the broader South Australian manufacturing base that defined the same era.
Within the wider South Australian manufacturing ecosystem of the 1970s–1990s, Ace Shopfitters exemplified the intermediate, construction-oriented layer of what economists termed ‘elaborately transformed manufactures’*—products and services where value is added through customised fabrication, project-based work and installation rather than through large-batch standardised production. (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2002; Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, n.d.). While much of Australian manufacturing during this period was steadily offshored or hollowed out, businesses like Ace endured because what they made could not easily be separated from how it was made, where it was installed, or by whom.
They were not a factory in the traditional sense. They were a managed production partner.
I know this because my father, Rino Russo, was one of the founders of Ace Shopfitters, together with Leo Cassarin and Bob Davies. Dad arrived in Australia from Italy at 19 years of age with no English, no financial backing and no existing professional network. There were no government funds supporting local manufacturers in those days. No innovation grants, no National Reconstruction Fund, no industry strategy documents naming small fabricators as strategic assets.
Several years after dad retired, I asked him: “how did you build this business?” His answer was immediate and unequivocal: “It is all about relationships.”
That answer has stayed with me. And in the context of what the Australian fashion manufacturing sector is now trying to build, I think it deserves more than a footnote.
The Managed Production Partner Model
What Ace Shopfitters mastered over its lifetime was not simply fabrication. Any number of firms could cut aluminium, manufacture joinery and assemble fittings. What distinguished Ace and sustained it across nearly five decades, was its capacity to act as the connector between a client’s vision and a finished physical outcome.
This meant understanding the brief before the brief was written, managing trades, timelines and tolerances. It meant being the organisation that a brand, a developer, or a government client could hand a complex project to and trust that the outcome would arrive on time, on budget and to specification. Dad and his colleagues managed the relationship between concept and delivery.
This Managed Production Partner Model was based on the creation and maintenance of long‑term collaborations, working with selected production partners rather than pursuing one‑off jobs. It proved to be remarkably resilient because the value of the service was embedded in relationships, local knowledge, and project management capability—rather than in low-cost volume production. As a result it was structurally resistant to the forces that gutted standardised manufacturing through the 1980s and 1990s.
Critically, Ace Shopfitters connected directly to government procurement; a pathway that gave the business stability through economic cycles and allowed it to invest in capability and workforce over the long term.
Government as an anchor client is a model that appears repeatedly in the histories of businesses that have achieved manufacturing longevity in Australia, and it is one that current policy frameworks are beginning to recognise explicitly. The National Reconstruction Fund Corporation’s Enabling Capabilities priority area, for example, assesses investable projects against criteria that include supply chain resilience, secure job creation, and long-term economic participation (National Reconstruction Fund Corporation, 2024).
What This Means for the Smart Factory
The Australian Fashion Council’s EOI for Smart Factory feasibility study (2025) sought to examine the commercial and technical pathways to establish an AI-powered, on-demand clothing manufacturing facilit, one that integrates digital design, automated cutting, digital textile printing, and smart supply chain connectivity. The fundamental commercial challenge the Smart Factory will face is one that no amount of sophisticated equipment can resolve on its own: who is it actually for, and importantly, why will they keep coming back?
Image: The factory that I remember (1972 -2022).
This is where the shopfitting parallel becomes not just interesting but actionable.
Research into circular fashion consumer behaviour shows that while around 60% of consumers express interest in sustainable, locally-made fashion, only 15% translate that interest into actual purchasing behaviour (Lee, 2024). Cost-of-living pressures, price sensitivity, and the persistent gap between stated values and purchasing decisions mean that a factory designed to serve the aspirational majority is, in practice, likely to be sustained by a committed minority.
Understanding the specific triggers, barriers, and price thresholds that govern actual purchasing decisions should shape the factory’s service offering and pricing model from the ground up. Building for the wrong customer base, or assuming that ethical messaging alone will close the intention-behaviour gap, ensures that well-intentioned manufacturing initiatives fail to reach viability.
The viable commercial zone for a Smart Factory is not converting the 60% who express interest. It is designing with precision for the 15% who already act.
Those 15% are not paying a premium purely on ethical grounds. They are paying for something categorically different from that which offshore production offers: speed, responsiveness, traceability, customisation, and a relationship with the production process itself.
These are the attributes the shopfitting model perfected and they are the attributes (digital product passports, on-demand runs without minimum order quantities, provenance documentation, co-design capability with a focus on long term relationships) that a well-designed Smart Factory can deliver.
The lesson from Ace Shopfitters seem to be that success lies in designing the manufacturing service architecture with the managed production partnerships at its centre. That means building the pricing model, workflow, turnaround commitments and brand relationships around what makes the 15% pay a sustainable premium and doing it with the relational depth that makes switching costly for all the right reasons.
The AFC’s Victorian TCF research supports this framing, finding that strategic intervention in the sector could generate significant economic returns and employment outcomes, but only where the manufacturing model is integrated with brand strategy rather than operating at arm’s length from it (Australian Fashion Council, 2024).
Relationships Are Still the Foundation
My father and his colleagues built a business that employed 160 people over nearly five decades without a government strategy naming him a strategic asset, without a digitised supply chain, and without a single innovation grant. They did it by understanding that manufacturing, at its core, is a service and that services run on relationships.
The Smart Factory program has something that dad did not have: a policy environment that is, for the first time in a generation, actively trying to rebuild Australia’s industrial capability. The AFC’s National Manufacturing Strategy, the NSW Fashion Sector Strategy 2025–2028, and the feasibility study process itself represent a coordinated policy effort without recent precedent (Australian Fashion Council, 2025b; NSW Government, 2025).
What it still needs is the relational architecture that turns infrastructure into a viable business. That means anchor clients and brands who commit to the model, not just express interest in it. It means government procurement pathways that give the facility the stability to invest in capability across economic cycles, the same pathway that allowed Ace Shopfitters to grow and endure.
It may seem unusual to draw a line between a shopfitter in Brompton and the future of Australian fashion manufacturing. But the line is there. It runs through the idea of the managed production partnership; through the primacy of relationships over transactions and through the recognition that the businesses that have lasted in Australian manufacturing have done so not because they competed with offshore on cost, but because they offered something that offshore production structurally cannot.
This is the argument that I hope to see in the AFC's National Manufacturing Strategy for Fashion and Textiles. It is an argument with fifty years of evidence behind it.
In memory of Rino Russo, Leo Cassarin and Bob Davies - Directors, Ace Shopfitters.
References
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2002). Elaborately transformed manufactures. Year Book Australia, 2002 (ABS Catalogue No. 1301.0). ABS.
https://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/B6362CCD5E7158FECA256B35007F93AC
Australian Fashion Council. (2024). Victorian textile, clothing and footwear manufacturing study. Australian Fashion Council.
Australian Fashion Council. (2025a). Australian Clothing Smart Factory feasibility study brief. Australian Fashion Council. https://ausfashioncouncil.com/program/afc-australian-clothing-smart-factory/
Australian Fashion Council. (2025b). AFC National Manufacturing Strategy. Australian Fashion Council. https://ausfashioncouncil.com/program/afc-national-manufacturing-strategy/
Australian Fashion Council & EY. (2021). From high fashion to high vis: The economic contribution of Australia’s fashion and textile industry. Australian Fashion Council.
Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. (n.d.). Trade Import Export Classification (TRIEC). Australian Government. https://www.dfat.gov.au/trade/trade-and-investment-data-information-and-publications/trade-statistics/merchandise-trade-statistical-pivot-tables
Flinders University. (2025). Factory of the Future: About us. https://www.flinders.edu.au/factory-of-the-future/about-us
Flinders University News. (2023, February 26). Flinders partners Tonsley Technical College. https://news.flinders.edu.au/blog/2023/02/26/flinders-partners-tonsley-technical-college/
National Reconstruction Fund Corporation. (2024). Insight snapshot: Understanding the Enabling Capabilities priority area. https://www.nrf.gov.au/news-and-media-releases/insight-snapshot-understanding-enabling-capabilities-priority-area
NSW Government. (2025). NSW Fashion Sector Strategy 2025–2028. NSW Department of Industry, Science and Resources.
Note: Elaborately Transformed Manufactures (ETMs) is an official Australian trade classification, that comes from DFAT's own Trade Import Export Classification (TRIEC) system, which classifies Australia's trade according to level of processing, distinguishing Simply Transformed Manufactures (STM) from Elaborately Transformed Manufactures (ETM) Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, with time series data running from 1989–90 onwards.
About the Author
Dr Angelina Russo is the founder of Fleurieu Made, an Australian circular fashion label, and the developer of the FM Circular Fashion IQ Index—a measurement architecture designed to make circular manufacturing capability legible to procurement partners and policymakers. She is the Green Industries SA 2024–25 Women in Circular Economy Leadership Fellow and a 2025 Adelaide University Venture Catalyst graduate. Contact angelina@fleurieumade.com