SYDNEY – WearAustralian is putting down roots Stateside.
Founded in early 2020 by Western Australian entrepreneurs Richard Poulson and Kelly Atkinson as an industry solidarity initiative to help Australian fashion brands manage orders canceled at the start of the COVID-19 crisis, and later transformed into an ongoing awareness campaign and e-commerce concept, WeWearAustralian’s first permanent brick-and-mortar store on Saturday on Ho Street Mercer.
Showcasing a rotating residency of up to 35 Australian brands at a time, mainly fashion but also interior art, the 5,000-square-foot store is the first of four US WeWearAustralian stores that the husband and wife plan to open in the next five years. The Upper East Side location is slated to open in 2027, followed by stores in Palm Beach and Dallas.
Hats by Helen Kaminski, shoes by Bared Footwear and sweater by Yaneth at the WeWearAustralian store in SoHo.
Philip Tran
All sales are made in real estate, and Poulson and Atkinson take a registration fee from participants. Brands can get real-time intelligence on store performance through a partnership with Flagship, a Sydney-based digital visual merchandising platform powered by AI.
The price of each store model will vary by location. For SoHo, it’s a trendy price range of $300 to $1,200, and brands include Akubra, Bondi Born, Bared Footwear, Esse Studios, Hansen & Gretel, Lee Mathews, Silk Laundry, Ilio Nema and Viktoria & Woods. Featured artists include Tom Butterworth, Henryk and First Nations designers from Nina Fitzgerald’s Laundry Gallery, with furniture and home furnishings from McMullin and Co., Rachel Donath and Antico Home.
Two Melbourne-based designers have been commissioned to design a SoHo store. Erin Lambrecht designed the interior, and Suzie Stanford created two original copper bracelets featuring Australian animals such as kangaroos, koalas, lizards and moths.
Helen Kaminski bag and hat, Bared Footwear shoes and Yaneth sweaters at WeWearAustralian store in SoHo.
Philip Tran
Another to be present on Saturday is WeWearAustralian.com, a dedicated US e-commerce platform that sells a range of Australian brands year-round, replacing Duo’s previous website Showroom-X. WeWearAustralian.com.au will remain visible in Australia, as a non-commercial information platform.
The company will cover local logistics, operations, fees and fulfillment through a third-party center in Austin, with additional support provided to any Australian brands hoping to expand in America after their residency.
“It’s plug-and-play – a turnkey solution,” said Poulson, co-founder of Western Australian fashion chain Morrisons, who moved to New York with Atkinson and their young daughter to oversee the business.
He added: “We are blowing it up. “They can test the market here at a low price. If they want to expand and create their own pop-up shop, we can do it for them. We have brands that want to sell stores after testing, we can do that too.”
Henryk painting, Fomu Studio tables and lamp, Virtue Objects vase and Bared Footwear at the WeWearAustralian SoHo boutique.
Philip Tran
WearAustralian joins a growing group of Australian fashion stores in the US, including Zimmermann, Scanlan Theodore, Camilla, RM Williams, Ksubi, Princess Polly and Tony Bianco. This is not to mention the proliferation of Australian restaurants, bars and pubs across the country. The Bluestone Lane coffee chain – whose founder Nick Stone is an investor in WeWearAustralian – now operates more than 55 locations in the US, including 15 in New York City.
Since its inception, WeWearAustralian has supported more than 350 brands, generating more than 20 million social media impressions in 2020-2021 alone and millions of Australian dollars in sales for the brands, according to Poulson and Atkinson. In May 2023, Australian Fashion Week closed with WeWearAustralia’s 88-model runway show.
Exterior shot of the new WeWearAustralian store at 69 Mercer Street, SoHo.
Philip Tran
The move to 2026 physical sales follows two days of New York pop-ups in February and September 2025. The first, in partnership with Joor and Australia Post, generated approximately 1 million Australian dollars in combined sales and sales revenue across six days, or $650,000 in exchange for that time. At the same time, US activity on the website rose 149 percent year over year.
“That conversation started a conversation,” said Atkinson, creative director of WeWearAustralian. We were like, ‘Okay, maybe this works here. This is probably ‘true’. Americans were very fond of Australian products.
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