Country Road

Country Road was founded in Melbourne in 1974 by Stephen Bennett as a small label making women's shirts. Its relaxed, well-made basics in natural fibres, worn with a sense of easy, outdoor Australian style, found a ready market, and through the late 1970s and 1980s the label grew into a full wardrobe for men and women, sold through its own stores in the main Australian cities. Its knits, chinos, shirts and canvas bags became a uniform of a certain urban Australian life.

In the 1980s Country Road was one of the first Australian fashion brands to try its luck abroad, opening stores in the United States, including in New York, Boston and Chicago. The New York Times reported its expansion in 1989, but the American business struggled for years and was eventually closed. Ownership has changed several times. In 1998 the South African retailer Woolworths Holdings, unrelated to the Australian supermarket chain, acquired a controlling interest. The retailer Solomon Lew kept a substantial minority stake for many years, preventing Woolworths from taking the company private, until he accepted its offer in July 2014, ending a seventeen-year standoff; Country Road was then delisted from the Australian Securities Exchange.

Under Woolworths the company became Country Road Group, a stable of Australian brands: Trenery, launched in 2009 for an older customer; Witchery and Mimco, acquired in 2012; and the menswear chain Politix, added in 2016. The group is headquartered in Burnley, in Melbourne's inner east, and in 2025 counted about 630 stores and concessions, most of them in Australia and New Zealand. The group employed about 3,470 people that year, while the original label remained its flagship and namesake.

The 2020s have been testing, with softer consumer spending and rising costs. Steven Cook, a former Debenhams chief executive, was appointed to run the group in 2025. In 2026 Woolworths Holdings reported that Country Road Group had returned to profitability on an adjusted basis and, in September, denied reports that it was looking to sell the Country Road brand. More than half a century on, Country Road remains a reference point for Australian casual dressing, built on the same idea of quality basics that began with a shirt.