The Tech 20

When Accent Group set out to overhaul its customer data infrastructure, the scale of the problem was stark: 150 data sources, 30 websites and nearly 900 stores generating fragmented signals across a billion-dollar, multi-brand retail portfolio. With group GM of technology Jason Ried involved, the technology team pushed through a full CDP replatform onto a customer data cloud, working cross-functionally to define a consistent data model and drive adoption beyond a single team. The first campaign through the new platform hit a 100% YouTube match rate and delivered four times the projected ROI. Getting the data foundations right wasn’t optional. It was the infrastructure that everything else runs on.

Leah Balter took the helm of OneDigital in August 2025, inheriting one of Australian retail's most ambitious data platforms. Wesfarmers' shared data and digital division — sitting across retail brands including Kmart, Target, Bunnings and Priceline — is now accelerating under her leadership: deepening the OnePass membership program, leveraging a shared data platform spanning more than 12 million customer records, and building a group retail media network commercialising data across Wesfarmers' businesses. Previously the technology lead at Bunnings, Balter brings a track record in digital and supply chain transformation to a division recording more than $3 billion in e-commerce sales and 220 million monthly digital customer interactions in FY24.

The Iconic is tackling artificial intelligence head-on in a landmark deal with Google, putting the platform at the forefront of agentic AI shopping in Australia. The Iconic CTO Adam Cox is driving the integration, which creates a new demand capture layer across Google’s AI surfaces for high-intent, product-led purchases. With 39% of Australians already using AI to inform buying decisions, the pilot is focused on understanding how agentic discovery can complement The Iconic’s owned channels without compromising its proposition on trust, relevance and experience. “The question isn’t whether the shift will impact retail,” Cox says, “but how we can help shape it.”

David Jones’ tech boss Hugh Fahy has been very busy. He has overseen the overhaul of the department store’s 4-million-strong loyalty program, helped scale David Jones’ retail media arm Amplify past 1,000 brand campaigns, and even ramped up its customer payments infrastructure with Weixin Pay now live across 16 stores nationwide. This work forms part of a $250 million transformation investment from owner Anchorage Capital Partners, with $75 million directed into digital. Now, Fahy’s team has its sights on the next frontier: an AI super-agent capable of orchestrating data across David Jones’ distributed SaaS platforms – a move that could underpin the retailer’s digital transformation for years to come.

Nineteen brands. One platform. Brand Collective’s migration of its entire D2C portfolio onto a single digital ecosystem, led by GM of digital and e-commerce Aaron Gard, has delivered results that make the case plainly: new brand launch timelines halved, conversion rates up 15–25%, online sales growing 10% year-on-year, and overhead costs down 60%. The move followed the 2022 merger with PAS Group, which left the group managing a fragmented legacy infrastructure across fashion, sport and lifestyle labels. Consolidating onto a single architecture didn’t just clean up the back end — it gave the team room to focus on growth.

Australia manufactures just 3% of its own clothing and textile products. AFC executive chair Marianne Perkovic is building the roadmap to change that. In March 2026, Perkovic led the launch of the National Manufacturing Strategy for Australian Fashion and Textiles at Parliament House — a ten-year plan targeting technology-enabled, premium domestic production anchored in Australia's natural fibre strengths. The result of almost a year of consultation across 300-plus stakeholders, the strategy is projected to grow TCF manufacturing value-added from $2.6 billion to $2.9 billion by 2030/31, delivering a cumulative $1.4 billion economic dividend and more than 1,000 new skilled jobs.

For a brand with 80 years of history, Oroton’s in-store technology was becoming a liability. Disconnected on-premise systems meant digital and physical channels couldn’t talk to each other — a gap that mattered more as customer expectations for seamless retail kept rising. Saurabh Bhola, CTO at Oroton, oversaw the replacement of that legacy infrastructure with a cloud-based, mobile-first unified commerce platform across 30+ stores, unlocking capabilities the old stack simply couldn’t support: associates completing transactions anywhere on the floor, endless aisle access to full inventory, and flexible fulfilment options including click-and-collect and in-store returns. The brief wasn’t just modernisation. It was closing the gap between the brand’s reputation and its retail reality.

Decjuba has deployed an AI agent that monitors every order in real time — flagging SLA breaches, calculating customer lifetime value at risk and surfacing fulfilment exceptions across third-party logistics and delivery partners in a single dashboard. The system goes further than visibility: one live example automatically authenticated a suspicious order, verified the address, and either approved or blocked delivery without human intervention. GM of technology Steven Crisapulli drove the integration with Decjuba’s ERP system, targeting a problem with real commercial stakes — one in five customer orders encounter an operational issue. “All those steps just happened automatically in the background,” Crisapulli said. The fix is invisible. That’s the point.

Zoe Raine and the wider team have spent the last few years upgrading the department store’s front-end experiences, including launching a shoppable app in late 2025 and rolling out an overhauled loyalty program. The loyalty program boasts around 5 million members, and has been stretched across Myer’s newly acquired Just Group brands – Just Jeans, Jay Jays, Portmans, Dotti and Jacqui E – alongside loyalty partnerships with Virgin, Dan Murphys, Door Dash and more. Meanwhile, the shoppable app has millions of downloads across Android and Apple phones, all adding to Myer’s reigning status as the leading fashion-centric website in Australia in terms of monthly traffic.

Matt Keays has spent a decade building the technology foundations at Michael Hill — and the results are starting to show. As CTO, Keays oversaw the development of an AI-powered in-store quoting tool that replaced a three-week bespoke jewellery process with instant machine learning-driven quotes, handling 56% of all quotes and driving 11% of purchases during the 2023 Christmas peak. That applied innovation set the conditions for what came next: the group’s AI Centre of Excellence, now embedding intelligence across merchandising, inventory, sales, customer engagement and support functions — the technology layer quietly underneath Michael Hill’s ambition to become an AI-powered retailer.

Australians could spend $7.5 billion on live commerce for pre-loved fashion over the next 12 months — and eBay is moving to capture it. Anne-Marie Cheney, eBay Australia head of recommerce, has overseen the platform's local rollout since December 2025, launching first into trading cards and collectibles before expanding into fashion with a 24-hour drop event spanning more than 100 livestreams and 1,000 items. The demand signals are clear: 41% of Australians cite value as their primary driver for live commerce purchasing, 33% want to view items in real time, and 48% report shopping driven by FOMO. The US equivalent broke its own Black Friday daily sales record by 60%. Bringing pre-loved fashion to eBay Live is a natural next step.

Strand has strong customer-facing technology. Its backend is the problem — and John Khoury, the retailer’s recently appointed CTO, is the one fixing it. Khoury is leading a four-year uplift program across three legacy platforms reaching end of life: ERP, customer data management and CRM systems, each to be replaced through consolidation onto best-in-class global SaaS vendors. The goal is a clean base within two years — agile enough to scale, enter new markets and respond to threats faster. “The back end and technology at the backend with processes need to catch up to ensure that we are agile, we can scale, we can grow,” Khoury said. The front end earned trust. The back end will unlock it.

Workwear Group spent the 2025 financial year resetting its operating model and cost base — and the payoff is now visible. Revenue grew in the first half of FY26, driven by stronger sales across corporate uniforms and industrial workwear brands, with earnings broadly in line after stripping out prior period restructuring costs. As CIO, Debbie Browning oversaw the back-end infrastructure work that underpinned that reset, with the ERP implementation cited by Wesfarmers CFO Anthony Gianotti as a key enabler of the group’s market share gains. The business has since secured new strategic customer commitments in the defence sector commencing FY27 — and will transition into the Bunnings Group from July 2026, where digital capability strengthening remains a stated priority.

Australia sends more than 200,000 tonnes of clothing to landfill every year. Nic Baldwin, head of Salvos Stores, is building the infrastructure to reverse that. In March 2026, Salvos opened what is believed to be Australia’s first automated textile sorting and decommissioning facility in Brisbane, backed by $4.97 million in Queensland government funding. The facility is designed to process up to 5,000 tonnes of textiles annually, recovering recyclable feedstock and generating additional revenue to fund The Salvation Army’s frontline programs. Across 400-plus stores, Salvos already kept 52 million items in circulation last year. The facility extends that model beyond second-hand retail into industrial-scale recovery — waste as a commercial asset.

Kmart is powering towards an agentic AI breakthrough across multiple stages of the shopping journey, and Kmart Group CCO Bernard Wilson is the commercial force behind it. The group has already rolled out virtual try-on and “see it in my space” functionality via Joy, Kmart’s conversational AI shopping assistant, which accepts natural language prompts across style, colour, occasion and budget, and allows customers to upload photos for tailored recommendations. Wilson says that customers aren’t just searching anymore; they’re engaging conversationally and looking for ideas and guidance. The commercial case for agentic AI is already visible: online sales hit $630 million in the first half of FY26, representing 10.3% of total revenue across a $6.3 billion half.

Jane Lu and her team at Showpo have spent the past year rebuilding the back-end infrastructure of a $100 million-plus global fashion business. The work ran on two tracks simultaneously: a full e-commerce migration to a headless storefront architecture — Showpo's second replatforming in two years — delivered without a single customer-facing outage, resolving critical issues with site speed, mobile optimisation and product discoverability across Australia, North America and Europe; and the opening of a US warehouse, driven by the unsustainable cost of processing returns back to Australia and back again. A UK warehouse is now coming, timed ahead of anticipated 2027 tariff changes.

Five brands. One legacy problem. Country Road Group’s digital estate — spanning Country Road, Trenery, Mimco, Politix and Witchery — was running on infrastructure that couldn’t keep pace with the business. The group tore it down and rebuilt, delivering a unified headless commerce platform across all five brand websites, with overhauled search, faster load times and personalisation capabilities that the old stack couldn’t support. Conversion rates improved. For a group turning over more than $1 billion annually, with digital taking a growing share, the rebuild wasn’t a renovation — it was a foundation replacement. The old websites were a ceiling. The new ones are a starting point.

Peter Alexander’s loyalty program is already delivering results that justify the investment. Launched in October 2025, Peter’s Dreamers exceeded management expectations from day one — members contributed 60% of brand sales in the first half and transacted at an average value 45% above non-members, with the program expected to surpass one million customer acquisitions by FY26 end. Frank De Sa, head of marketing and online, oversaw the rollout against a brand already in strong growth: first-half sales hit $312.3 million, up 4.9% year-on-year, with annual sales more than doubling over six years at a 13.7% CAGR. The loyalty data is now the asset. De Sa’s focus is using it.

When SABA turned 60, general manager Lucinda Grice didn’t commission a campaign — she went looking for the source material. Around 600 archival items, including press clippings, memorabilia and brand records spanning six decades, were recovered from founder Joe Saba’s personal home and digitised, with a portion contributed to the State Library of Victoria. The project required working directly with Saba and his wife Marita to surface material that had sat largely untouched since he sold the business in 2002. The archive became the engine for a full anniversary campaign: retrospective content, window activations across all 21 freestanding stores and planned in-store appearances by Saba himself. Heritage, properly catalogued, is a commercial asset. Grice proved it.

R.M.Williams is undergoing a significant technology transformation, and Peter Ratcliffe is at the wheel. The brand has gone live with a new product lifecycle management platform, replacing disconnected workflows with a shared system and common data principles connecting product development, manufacturing and downstream platforms. This connects seamlessly across R.M.Williams’s broader technology landscape, including ERP. Meanwhile, a second Adelaide workshop has significantly scaled the brand’s local capacity with technology playing a key role in coordinating that manufacturing scale-up, with all this being driven by further international expansion in the UK and a booming online channel where global sales are up 30 per cent.