We previously partnered with some warehouses that did not understand the online model, so for the first few years we had to keep on changing warehouse. Most warehouses were geared up to the Ikea model and didn’t understand the importance of speed of communications. Online customers are not happy until they have a tracking model and can see the status of their order. It’s a costly exercise moving warehouse once or twice, but we’ve learnt from that and improved.
We don’t really have a sales team as such. Our sales team is our website really. We have a customer service team of 15 now.
Not really marketing as such, but our growing Facebook community. It’s not traditional marketing; it is more engagement. We are engaging with our customers in two-way communications in every single way. That is the best marketing you can do, it is real time. We can make decisions and customers inform us and, as a result, you make better decisions and you are giving the customer exactly what they want. We have 11,000 followers who are really engaged in our site.
Our growth strategy is two-pronged. In Australia, we want to be Australia’s number one online furniture retailer. We are also growing a really loyal Facebook community and following. We engage with them daily and ask what they want from our business and add products that they say they are interested in. We are going to keep expanding within the categories we have.
The second part of our strategy is our global expansion, so we have a list of countries to roll out to. Our vision in the next five years is to be a global leader in the online furniture market. We have pretty big ambitions, but we are heading in the right direction.
Profits come naturally when you are selling a great product in an efficient manner and we believe online is the best way to do that. We don’t sit there trying to work out how to make more profit; it is a natural consequence of a great business model.
We more than doubled our growth from $5 million last financial year to $12 million and with our global expansion plans we see Milan Direct as a $50 million company in three years’ time.
It’s fantastic because my passion is furniture and my dad’s passion is furniture, so I have grown up from a really young age finding out every single thing about the furniture business. My grandad was very hands on and made all the furniture himself, they were making Australian-made furniture for over 60 years and then my dad taught me how to market and the business model for the industry.
When you are brought up in the industry it has always been a passion to follow, so the idea for Milan Direct came really easily to me. That’s my number one tip for business is to run a business that you are passionate about and really love. Every day, going to work for me is like a game, as I get to share my passion. It’s authentic and not faking it.
Cara Waters is a former SmartCompany editor. Previously, Cara was a senior reporter for the Financial Times’ website and worked for The Sunday Times in London.
