About Sambag
The story continues
Sambag began at Paddington markets in Sydney back in 1996. In 2005 we opened our first store on a busy Woollahra street corner - an aqua-blue beacon above the traffic, with its smart, Manhattan-style awning and double full-length windows. A year later, we opened in Sydney’s eminent Strand Arcade and soon after in Melbourne. Over the next decade, we rapidly expanded in NSW, Victoria, Queensland and Perth. In 2012, we opened a store in Hong Kong and by mid-2015, had 12 stores, an online shop with consistent sales across the group and we had launched a seasonal magazine! A-listers Elle Macpherson, Christina Ricci, Robin Wright, Nicole Kidman and Naomi Watts have all walked through our doors.
While Sam has been dubbed the ‘quiet achiever’ of Australian fashion, that has not stopped others wanting to celebrate her success. In late 2017, Sam hosted a party at her Woollahra store to celebrate 20 years in the business - the high glitz event attracting media, celebrities, fashion icons and long-term supporters who swore by her simplistic, artistic and stylish approach to women’s fashion. Eighteen months later, in May 2018, Sam announced that Sambag would be closing as a new era of retail came to the fore: “The world is not the same as it was 22 years ago,” she said. “Retail has definitely changed a lot.”
Sam confesses she is constantly re-evaluating and the time away had enabled her to reassess both her life and the brand. Her endless love for the ballet flat - and her long-term success in designing, producing and providing her flats for countless numbers of women across the globe, made her realise that the strength of her brand’s success lay in these beautiful shoes and their timeless appeal and following: "Online is phenomenal. We’ve got a very good staple brand, people know what they want to buy from us, so it’s just a matter of ordering online".
So with a brand new website, a revamped designer logo and a fresh new approach, Sambag relaunches with the Bestsellers in November 2018.