Founded in 2008, just as the GFC (Global Financial Crisis) hit, we established a Furniture and Homewares retail outlet focusing on French Provincial style.
Main Services:
Furniture Retail, Home Decor Retail
One of the owners (Ruth) is a qualified Interior Designer with a strong background in Sales and Personnel Recruitment. David, the other owner, comes from a strong IT background developing business systems whilst also having an early educational background in woodworking and furniture construction. Together they believed they could make this business a success!
Within six months of opening the doors to a 90sqm shop, a fully functional e-commerce store was up and running on the web, single-handedly developed by David on a 3rd-party framework and offering hundreds of products for purchase. Despite its humble beginnings, at the time (early 2009) the website was one of the first in its industry to offer furniture for sale online. In fact, some in the industry criticized us for publishing the price of furniture on-line, let alone selling it!
Originally we sourced furniture from local distributors, and within two years we became the largest customer for one of our suppliers, enabling us to receive containers directly from the overseas factory managed by Bramble Co of USA. This gave us confidence to source more product directly from other factories without the need of purchasing through local wholesalers.
For the first four years, Ruth was managing the business while David juggled his time helping out after hours and on weekends despite still working in the IT industry for corporate clients. However in 2012, business had grown and a new 360sqm store was leased in Richmond – the heart of the furniture retail industry in Melbourne, Australia. Signing for the new lease certainly caused a flurry of butterflies in the stomach, however the optimism was soon realised with a three-fold increase in sales upon opening the new store doors.
While French Provincial style is still the cornerstone of the product range, warmly received for its enduring and timeless appeal, we have ventured into other styles such as Hamptons, Mid-Century Modern and Boho Chic. We are keen representatives of the Bramble Co range which enables us to source custom-coloured pieces for our customers on a one-off basis. Bramble Co is constantly updating their range with exciting and unique pieces that can be ordered in any colour or finish. Their furniture is purely made from either solid Mahogany or Teak, often exhibiting traditional construction techniques. Since 2013 we have been dealing directly with the factory after the Australian distributor at the time went into administration.
Similarly, we now source high-end products directly from Uttermost USA after the local distributor went out of business.
As far as our warehousing operations go, we originally handled inventory out of several storage units in a Self Storage facility. It was owned by a removalist family who was able to perform local deliveries for us. By 2012, David started working full-time, we purchased a removal van and leased two side-by-side warehouse units totaling 400sqm of storage. In 2020 we moved operations to a 500sqm, 8m high warehouse with another 200sqm of showroom, office, kitchen and plenty of parking. The new warehouse is ideal for receiving 40ft containers.
What probably makes us different from our competitors is that we QA everything that comes through the warehouse. We have a very low percentage of claims and even lower returns, probably on average 3 or 4 per year. We have a very high level of customer satisfaction and repeat customers. If there are any issues with our products we quickly try to resolve them.
With regard to the website, we have always managed to achieve high organic results on the search engines through our own efforts. We have never invested in Google ads and have resisted seeking 3rd-party help for SEO purposes. However, David has come to realise that tools like diib.com provide are very necessary for monitoring and fine-tuning the website to keep achieving high organic search results.
As a matter of Interest, when we first established a website in 2009, we used to receive several hundred dollars a month from Google for hosting ads on the bottom of our website! Within a year or so though, Google realised the error of their ways and the commission from those ads reduced to a dribble such that there was no point for us to host them.
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