On September 15, one of Australia’s most recognisable fashion businesses entered voluntary administration and receivership.
Cue Clothing Co has been around since 1968. Its Cue and Veronika Maine brands are still trading while receivers assess the business and seek a buyer.
FTI Consulting, the receivers and managers appointed for Cue, say increased sales and other improvements across the group had not been enough to overcome its overhead costs.
This is more important than it first appears.
The easiest explanation for the failure of an old retailer is that consumers simply stopped buying from it.
But Cue’s latest reported accounts tell a more interesting story. Sales actually rose 5 percent to $103.2 million, while its loss narrowed from $14.1 million to $5.1 million.
Consumers had not simply forgotten Cue.
And that exposes a much more uncomfortable lesson for heritage brands.
Being remembered is not the same thing as being powerful enough to drive profitable consumer choice.
Heritage can be enormously valuable
Cue has something most retailers would envy: decades of accumulated recognition.
Its association with Australian working women runs particularly deep. The Powerhouse collection describes an affinity between working women and Cue stretching across generations, while Cue itself still describes workwear as a staple of the Australian women’s wardrobe.
That history has value.
Research on brand heritage suggests that age and longevity can act as signals of quality and can, in some circumstances, increase what consumers are prepared to pay.
But heritage can also encourage a dangerous assumption: because consumers know us, they will continue to choose us.
Those are different things.
A consumer might remember a brand fondly. She might know exactly what it stands for. She may even still occasionally buy from it.
The commercial question is whether the brand remains distinctive enough, relevant enough and valuable enough to win that purchase often enough and at a price that supports the business behind it.
That is a much higher bar.
The way consumers find alternatives has changed
When Cue built its reputation, being a familiar name carried an enormous advantage.
A woman looking for workwear could walk into a shopping centre already knowing Cue and choose between a relatively contained set of familiar brands.
That is no longer how the choice begins.
For younger consumers especially, fashion discovery increasingly happens before they set out to shop.
Australia Post’s 2026 eCommerce Report found that 69 percent of Gen Z use social media for product discovery.
Its previous report found social media shopping and browsing among Gen Z and Millennials was concentrated particularly in fashion, with discovery the most commonly cited attraction.
This matters because platforms such as Instagram do not simply show consumers brands they already know.
Their recommendation systems learn from what people follow, watch and engage with, then put new products, styles and brands in front of them.
Recent research gives us a glimpse of what that means for fashion.
A 2025 study examined how engaged fashion consumers interact with Instagram’s algorithmic recommendations.
It found consumers actively shaping those recommendations as they searched for styles, brands and fashion influences that fitted their tastes.
That changes the competitive environment for a heritage brand like Cue.
A brand the shopper has never heard of can now appear in the same feed as one she has known for years, not because it has spent decades building recognition, but because the platform has decided its clothes are likely to appeal to her.
Brand recognition still matters, but it no longer controls the doorway into consideration in quite the way it once did.
And once an unfamiliar brand and a 58-year-old brand are sitting side by side on the same screen, the question becomes very simple: Why should the customer choose us now?
A famous name is not an answer.
This is not just a marketing failure
There is an important caution here.
We do not yet know enough to say Cue entered receivership because its positioning weakened.
Receivers have specifically identified overhead costs as a problem.
The company had also been through an ownership change, a sale process and recent management departures. Stores remain open and buyers are being sought.
Those factors may ultimately prove much more important than anything happening in consumers’ heads.
But the distinction between brand recognition and brand power becomes more important, not less, when a retailer carries substantial costs.
If the economics of a business require premium prices or significant sales volumes, the brand has to create enough consumer value to help sustain them.
That is why rising sales do not make Cue’s situation less interesting. They make it more so.
The trap facing heritage brands
Australia has no shortage of brands with decades of history.
That history can generate trust, familiarity and affection. It can give a company an advantage a new entrant would spend millions trying to reproduce.
But it is accumulated capital, not permanent protection.
The challenge for a heritage brand is to keep translating what it once represented into a compelling reason for consumers to choose it today.
Otherwise something strange can happen.
People can know the brand.
They can remember the brand.
They can even keep buying the brand.
And the business can still struggle.
Cue’s future is not yet decided. A buyer may see considerable value in two established Australian labels and find a more sustainable model for them.
Whatever happens next, Cue's current predicament offers a useful warning for every long-established retailer.
Heritage gets you remembered. It doesn’t necessarily get you chosen.
- Vishal Mehrotra is Assistant Professor of Marketing at Bond University.