Launching their brand on an international e-commerce platform, the plan is to become the biggest modest fashion provider on the continent. 

It started with a modest fashion Instagram blog accumulating over 25,000 followers within a year. Today, Twiice Boutique plans to become a major player in Australia’s $19 billion fashion and textile industry. 

“We wanted to see if people would be interested in our style and get a bit of an audience before we even considered doing it,” said Mawluda Momin, who launched the brand along with her sister Nigara and a friend in 2018. 

Now, releasing two Eid and one summer collection each year, Twiice Boutique says it has doubled its growth year on year, selling Momin’s designs in a shop and online. This year, the company will add a scarf brand to its current range of dresses, jumpsuits, tops and skirts. “Ultimately, we want to be a modest fashion house with multiple labels within it,” Momin said. 

She said Twiice will launch on “The Iconic,” an online fashion and lifestyle retailer operating in Australia and New Zealand. The Iconic is one of the four e-commerce platforms run by the Global Fashion Group, a Luxembourg-based fashion and lifestyle company generating $1.5 billion in revenue in 2020. The Iconic’s sales amounted to $292.1 million.

Twiice’s management team is also looking to build export markets, noting that their second largest online customer base is in the US. In terms of raw materials, fabrics and production are sourced from Turkey and China with all design work produced in-house.

Momin, who immigrated from China with her family in 2000, speaks Turkish, which is similar to her ancestral Uighur language, but little Chinese.

In addition to the online shop, six rotating staff operate the physical store in Australia’s capital Sydney, open seven days a week. 

“Sydney offers a huge customer base,” Momin said. The capital’s suburbs comprise of a majority Muslim population and feature strips of shops catering to the needs of Muslims, she said.

According to the 2016 Australian Census of Population and Housing, 2.6% of the total population of around 23 million are Muslim. The Muslim population grew by 15% compared to the census five years prior. 

Islam and Australian Aboriginal beliefs are the religions featuring the youngest median age (27 years). Christianity and Judaism both recorded a median age of 44 years. “There was a big gap for modest fashion to be more modern, more on-trend and more accessible,” Momin said. 

Australia’s fashion industry also saw an opportunity, and in 2019 Melbourne Fashion Week hosted its inaugural Modest Fashion Runway.

According to a report by Ernst & Young, the Australian fashion and textile industry generated $5.1 billion in export revenue in 2021. “That’s 1.7% of all Australian exports by value in 2021 — more than double the value of Australia’s wine and beer exports,” Leila Naja Hibri, CEO of the Australian Fashion Council, said. 

According to World Integrated Trade Solution data, in 2019, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt ranked among Australia’s top 15 fashion export markets.

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