A women’s fashion brand founded by a former emergency department nurse has closed three stores and slipped into voluntary administration after seven years in business.
Gold Coast-based Proud Poppy, which offers sizes 6-30, shops worldwide and has more than 200,000 followers on Instagram, 150,000 followers on Facebook and at one point had up to seven stores across Australia.
This week, it only had three listed on its website – Gympie and Toowoomba in Queensland and at Doreen in Victoria.
Stores at Shell Harbour and Wagga Wagga in NSW, as well as stores at Sale, Doncaster and Shepparton in Victoria have all been closed.
Tara McKeon, 39, founded the company in 2019 after a frustrating shopping trip sparked what she then built into a multimillion-dollar business.
In 2025, Ms McKeon was named as one of Inside Retail’s Top 50 People in E-Commerce, as Proud Poppy operated eight stores with more than 70 staff.
Administrators Kathleen Vouris, Richard Albarran and Marcus Watters of Hall Chadwick were appointed on Wednesday.
Ms McKeon took to Instagram on Thursday saying she’d appointed the administrators to help her restructure the company after struggling for “12 months”.
“I wanted to be really transparent about it, really open…