It’s Fashion, Baby! Gina Rinehart weighs acquisition of Driza-Bone

afr.com:

Driza-Bone, the iconic Australian oilskin coats and clothing products brand, is set to change hands – and become part of resources billionaire Gina Rinehart’s growing portfolio of non-mining businesses.

The company has been quietly marketed by boutique investment bank Lempriere Wells for some time. As The Australian Financial Review has previously reported, Driza-Bone was merged with RB Sellars, a rural clothing business founded by Richard Sellars-Jones. The combined group, known as Propel, was placed on the market in 2018.

Not many people wearing full-length waxed cotton jackets these days but Gina Rinehart may be about to change that.  Trevor Collens

Lempriere Wells – which is run by consumer specialist and perennial dealdoer Alice Wells – would know Driza-Bone well. The firm’s chairman, William Lempriere, has been on the board of Propel for more than two years, along with Caroline Elliott, who was appointed chief executive of the company in 2020.

It will be interesting to see the price paid by Rinehart and how the resources billionaire plans to revive the brand. The business is loss-making and despite a couple of years under Lempriere Wells’ expert stewardship, has failed to take off.

Driza-Bone, with a history stretching back to 1898, was acquired by the British motorcycle clothing company Belstaff in the late 1980s but then went through more ownership changes before the Lempriere family, which has strong interests in the wool industry, bought it well over a decade ago.

In 2017, it was merged with rural clothing company RB Sellars, founded by businessman Richard Sellars-Jones. The sale process in 2018, which struggled to find a new owner, was also overseen by Lempriere.

The mooted sale would cap off a busy year for