About Ragtrader

Ragtrader

Overview

Ragtrader is the trade publication of the Australian fashion industry, covering the business of clothing, footwear and accessories retailing and manufacturing for the people who run it. Published from Sydney by the independent, family-owned Yaffa Media group, it combines a daily news website with a print magazine and industry events, and it has reported on the Australian rag trade continuously since its first issue appeared in February 1972. Its subject matter is deliberately commercial rather than consumer-facing: company results, store networks, executive appointments, insolvencies, supply chains, marketing and the economics of fashion retail, rather than the seasonal trends covered by consumer fashion magazines. The title is the Australian fashion trade's longest-running specialist news source, and its website operates a metered model under which readers receive a number of free articles before being asked to subscribe. Alongside the daily news service, Ragtrader produces downloadable industry reports, a free newsletter and conference and awards programming, including its role in the Australian Fashion Industry Awards staged by Yaffa Media. Although the assigned listing type is Online News, reflecting the daily digital service that now leads the brand, the publication retains the print magazine at the core of its history, appearing in print on a bimonthly cycle in recent years alongside its events and digital output.

History

Ragtrader was founded in Sydney by Fraser McEwing, a journalist who had previously worked on Australian Fashion News and who persuaded backer Laurie White to support a fortnightly trade paper for the clothing industry. In his own retrospective account published by Ragtrader, McEwing recalled that the first issue came out on his birthday, 17 February 1972: it ran to just 12 pages, and from that first issue the paper never failed to publish twice a month. The early operation was famously makeshift — McEwing worked at first from a plywood office built at the back of a paper store in Surry Hills, in inner Sydney, before the business moved through Foveaux Street offices and eventually bought the terrace houses at 433–435 Riley Street, Surry Hills, whose wall long carried a Ragtrader pottery sign. Through the 1970s and 1980s the title grew with the local manufacturing and retail scene, and McEwing's group also published the Menswear trade magazine and ran a specialised rag-trade employment agency; in 1986 he formed Advance Fashion Publications to supply international fashion trend reports and magazines to the Australian industry.

McEwing sold his publishing group in 1991 and left Ragtrader officially in 1992, having led the masthead for twenty years, but he continued to write for the publication on commission for the rest of his life, contributing columns in print and online. Ragtrader changed hands again at the end of the decade: Yaffa Media's own centenary history records that the group bought Ragtrader in 1999, adding the fashion title to a stable of business and consumer magazines it had been assembling since the 1960s. Under Yaffa the title progressively shifted its centre of gravity from the fortnightly print paper to a daily digital news service, while retaining a print magazine, events and reports. McEwing himself returned to the Yaffa fold in another capacity in 2003, editing the group's Paint & Panel magazine for five years before leaving in 2008 to write fiction. Ragtrader has since published a vale recording McEwing's death at the age of 86, in which Cue founder Rod Levis and former Myer chief executive Bernie Brookes paid tribute to his role in Australian fashion journalism, and the title continues to republish his columns from its archives.

Content and Coverage

The daily website leads with hard business news from across the fashion retail ecosystem. In the week of this profile's preparation in October 2026, its front page carried stories on youth fashion retailer Forever New passing $400 million in turnover and planning its first United States store, Kmart products coming under ACCC scrutiny over safety compliance, apparel spending in New Zealand falling for a thirteenth consecutive quarter, the closure of 26 Cue and Veronika Maine stores, board changes at Lovisa and Step One, and analysis of why fashion brands including Mosaic Brands, Dion Lee, Wittner and Jeanswest had ended up in administrators' hands. That mix is characteristic: listed-company results and retail data sit alongside insolvency coverage, property and store-network news, executive moves and consumer-law and regulatory stories affecting retailers.

Beyond the news file, Ragtrader publishes features, interviews and analysis, including a "Sustainable 20" series profiling the professionals driving sustainability in Australian fashion, published in October 2026, and long-form material produced with partners through Yaffa Media's storytelling studio. It produces downloadable reports on core trade categories including fashion eCommerce, marketing and retail operations, and it maintains a deep online archive reaching back through decades of trade coverage, including Fraser McEwing's columns and retrospective series on the title's own history, such as its accounts of how Ragtrader was born in the 1970s and how it operated through the 1980s. Fashion week coverage, both Australian and international, remains a staple, approached from the trade angle of buyers, designers' businesses and retail outcomes rather than celebrity or street style.

Audience and Reach

Ragtrader's audience is the Australian fashion industry itself: retail executives, brand owners, manufacturers, wholesalers, agents and the service businesses that supply them. In a 2021 profile published by the Australian Fashion Council, Ragtrader's then publisher Assia Benmedjdoub described the title as a trusted source of information for the industry since the 1970s and said that the majority of its audience consisted of key decision-makers, including C-suite management and brand owners, put at 93 per cent of the readership in the title's own audience description. Those figures are the publisher's own characterisation rather than independently audited data, and no current audited circulation or readership figure for Ragtrader is published in the sources consulted for this profile, so none is asserted here. The publication's longevity, its role in industry events and the seniority of the executives who contribute to and are quoted in its pages are the practical indicators of its standing within the trade. Its coverage is national, following Australian fashion businesses into overseas markets such as New Zealand and the United States when their operations extend there.

Digital Presence

The centre of the brand today is ragtrader.com.au, updated daily with news, features and analysis and carrying the archive of the print title. Access is metered, with readers shown a running count of free articles remaining. A free email newsletter distributes the title's coverage, and subscription provides fuller access to the site and magazine. Ragtrader also publishes extended feature packages through Yaffa Media's digital storytelling platform and maintains the social and video presence typical of the group's titles. The print magazine continues on a bimonthly cycle, and the brand extends into live programming: Benmedjdoub's 2021 account described annual events and conferences as part of the Ragtrader offer, and Yaffa Media's Australian Fashion Industry Awards, whose 2026 edition the group has showcased online, draw on Ragtrader's industry position and contacts — the awards' marketing campaign of the year coverage describes Ragtrader itself introducing the winning brand team to archival material that became the campaign. The digital operation is produced from Yaffa Media's Sydney base, where the group runs its own website-building and digital design staff across its portfolio of titles.

Ownership and Organisation

Ragtrader is owned and published by Yaffa Media, one of Australia's oldest independent publishing houses. The Yaffa business was founded by David Yaffa, who set up a Sydney syndication agency after a 1920 trip to the United States and built it into the Australasian distributor of photographs, news features and famous comic strips, launching the trade monthly Newspaper News in 1928. His son, David Yaffa junior, ran the company from 1955 to 2012 and assembled its magazine stable, buying Ragtrader in 1999 among many acquisitions; the group marked its centenary in 2025 and rebranded from the Yaffa Publishing Group to Yaffa Media in 2015. The company remains privately held by the family — Yaffa's centenary history records that it is now owned by Tracy Yaffa and James Yaffa, with Tracy Yaffa as managing director — and it publishes a portfolio of business and consumer titles from Sydney. Within that structure Ragtrader operates as the group's fashion industry brand, with its own editorial team; Assia Benmedjdoub, who had been with the title for over a decade, was its publisher as documented in 2021. Founder Fraser McEwing remained a commissioned contributor long after selling the business, an arrangement that kept the founding editor's byline in the publication into its sixth decade.

Contact and Availability

Ragtrader is published by Yaffa Media from Sydney, New South Wales; the group's offices are at 17–21 Bellevue Street, Surry Hills NSW 2010. The daily news service, newsletter signup, subscription offers, reports and magazine information are all available through the publication's website, ragtrader.com.au. The website is the primary point of contact for editorial and commercial enquiries, and the publication invites industry participation through its events, awards and report programmes. Print copies of the magazine are distributed to subscribers in the fashion trade, and the site's metered access allows casual industry readers a limited number of free articles before a subscription is required.