For years Tracie Ellis would drive by a little corner store with its cascading ivy wall in Melbourne’s inner east, and dream of it one day being hers. And a week ago it became reality; with Tracie opening the bricks and mortar version of her very successful homewares brand, AURA Home.
Having established the label in 2000 and launched the online store nine years later, for Tracie, opening a retail space was an opportunity to take a step back and interact with the local community. “There’s no doubt there is a huge customer base that loves the convenience of shopping online, but there are also a lot of people who like to touch and feel our products. Our new store is a place to meet our loyal and new customers and inspire them to create beautiful spaces in their homes.”
With that idea in mind, Tracie decided to move away from the traditional shop layout, instead designing – with the help of interior designer Amanda Lynn – a space focused on the core areas of the home. “We have a living room area, to showcase our cushions and throws; a dining area, featuring our ceramics and linen; a beautiful bedroom space for our sheets and quilt covers; and a bathroom area draped with our beautiful towels.”
As well as AURA Home products, the store has incorporated furniture and homewares many may recognise from the brand’s beautiful photography. These include statement pieces from MRD furniture and HK Living, limited edition Isamu Sawa prints, no.27 fragrance house candles and much more. “We have worked with some very special people from some of our favourite brands to produce a curated range of products,” says Tracie. “We wanted to make sure we had something for everyone – the only problem is I keep buying things for myself every time I am in the store!”
Tracie
Situated in the suburb of Malvern, the high street is known as one of the go-to places to shop for furniture and homewares. “We would like to help build on that and create a place Melbournians can shop for all things home,” explains Tracie. “Malvern is beautiful and we already feel like we are part of the local community.”
Visit the AURA Home Concept Store at 1371 Malvern Rd, Malvern, Melbourne. And if you’re in the area next Thursday 7 December, make sure you check out the store, as they’ll be open until 9pm with champagne flowing!
We are so often told that the days of bricks and mortar homewares retail are numbered or that it’s impossible to succeed as a boutique shop these days. So when Sydney’s The Vignette Room recently celebrated two cracking years in business, I had to ask them to share their secrets! One half of the mother-daughter duo behind it, Jennifer Brown, lets us in our their learnings and what makes them stand out from the crowd.
Jennifer and Tracey with new team member Cassie at the beautifully styled The Vignette Room store
How fast two years go by! It feels like only yesterday that we opened the doors to The Vignette Room, with the aim of giving our customers an inspirational and immersive shopping experience in a beautifully styled homewares haven. We’ve learned a lot (note to selves: retail is hard!), but our time spent on the front line, listening to our customers’ feedback and experiencing the store environment every day, gives us a unique perspective and drives us to keep improving and evolving.
Our second anniversary seemed a good time to gather our thoughts, celebrate our successes and take an exciting new step. So here are a few reflections … and the launch of a fabulous service that we’ve been dying to offer since day one.
There’s nothing quite like instant gratification
It’s hard to beat that incredible rush when you find The One – you know, the perfect product you’ve tracked down after picking up all the others in the store. And that confidence you feel in knowing you’ve explored all options before reaching the right decision.
We believe this is still a wonderful advantage the in-store experience has over online ordering. No waiting, no uncertainty, and no disappointment when you receive something that’s not quite right. Just you and your gorgeous new possession, right there in your hand.
We’re pleased with how our store and online presence work together. We love the fact that we can post the unboxing of new stock on Instagram, which can lead customers to view its details on our website, then inspire them to come in, feel it for themselves and walk out with their purchase. Magic!
Personal connections make all the difference
That touch-and-feel element of the shopping experience is something we are proud to offer, and we love guiding our customers through the process. We’ve learned that confidence is important – the confidence of our customers in us, that we have hand-picked every product and styled it with love. And the confidence we can instil in our customers as we help them to find the perfect product or styling solution.
The most effective way we can provide assistance is in person. We delight in being able to advise both regulars, based on our personal knowledge of their shopping history, and newcomers, based on the stories they share with us. The most valuable feedback we receive is still the immediate sort, from customers as they shop.
Taking our store to the next level
Our exciting new offering was born from the insights we’ve gained thanks to this unique access to customers. The question we have been asked most over the past two years is ‘Do you have an interior styling service?’. Now the time is right, we’re thrilled to introduce that very thing.
As part of our more comprehensive interior styling and sourcing service, interior designer Cassie McCulloch has joined The Vignette Room and is available for paid in-store and in-home consultations. She can help with any aspect of interior styling, from a full planning service to finding items of furniture to establishing colour schemes, right down to finessing those finishing touches.
It’s been a big decision for this mum-and-daughter team to bring in another person, but Cassie’s like a member of the family who shares our passion and our aesthetic. Mum (Tracey Kennedy) and I will continue to offer our free in-store advice – and nothing can part us from the joy of engaging with our customers as they engage with our products! With this new service, we look forward to giving our customers an extra level of value and a great boost of confidence in making their style decisions.
–Jennifer Brown and Tracey Kennedy are co-owners of Sydney homewares store The Vignette Room. Visit them at 42 Gurner Street Paddington NSW or online at www.thevignetteroom.com.au
It’s been a year since we opened The Vignette Room, and we’ve loved offering customers a homewares haven within a sumptuously styled terrace house. Here are some in-store advantages that we think website shopping just can’t match.
Experience
We’re talking about the tactile joy our customers feel at getting up close and personal with our products. We believe a home – and a homewares store – should delight all the senses, and we encourage visitors to soak up our styling, inhale our candles, listen to our playlists and cuddle our cushions. The only sense we haven’t covered yet is taste and it’s next on our list – stay tuned.
Interaction
There’s nothing like a face-to-face conversation for allowing you to immediately understand a customer’s needs – and to respond to them. When customers show us images of their spaces and tell us about a look they want to achieve, we’re able to get a feel for their style and make on-the-spot recommendations. We’ll also source products at customers’ request, a service that’s easier to arrange in person.
Immersion
Because our store is set up like an “open home” display – admittedly a lavishly decorated one – we encourage customers to lose themselves in it and forget about their to-do list for a while. Having everything at your fingertips is an opportunity to interact with the products, to see scale, colour, fabrics for yourself and how they work in a space.
Inspiration
Styling ideas can be demonstrated more easily (and more lovingly) in an actual home space than on a screen. It also lets us show products in a new light via different, dramatically layered displays. We’ve used a chandelier as a table centrepiece and arrayed blue and white ceramics en masse – both these vignettes drew lots of attention.
Hospitality
By this we mean good old-fashioned customer service – providing that sense of feeling looked after, which can become lost in an online experience. There’s something thrilling about making a purchase, watching it being wrapped in chic tissue and then walking out the door with a crisp new shopping bag. We also offer a concierge service with private viewing times for customers who want that little something extra.
Personality
Standing out in an online world can be difficult, but walk into our store and you see our distinct styles. Mum favours bling while I prefer bohemian – and it’s how we combine these in-store, where you can see the eclectic mix, that sets us apart. Plus we both have so many of the different products in our own homes that we can personally vouch for them!
Immediacy
Walk in, spot something, buy it, walk out – oh, the joy of in-store shopping! There’s no waiting on shipping or worrying that a gift won’t arrive on time. What’s more, the product you see is the product you take home. We understand that not everyone makes the right decision straightaway, so we allow customers to observe the product they’ve purchased in their space and exchange or refund if it doesn’t suit.
Location
We knew it was an unorthodox choice to open a store in a Paddington terrace back from the main strip, but the space fitted our vision and we’re dedicated to making it work. Our shop-front stands out in the mix of terraces and has a strong appeal to walk-by traffic. We build further on our local audience by supporting school fundraisers and forging relationships with cafes. From there, word spreads.
Adaptability
Seeing how our customers shop allows us to adapt our store to meet their interests. We never intended our furniture range to be a focus, but rather as a display that supported our décor and accessories. However, the response to the original pieces was so positive that unique but affordable furniture has now become one of our most popular offerings.
Realism
While we love delivering a unique in-store experience, we know that an online presence is necessary – we want customers everywhere to have access to our products! We believe that our store, our website and our social media activity all work together and enhance one another. In a recent blog, we’ve offered to style our customers’ favourite products on Facebook – a way of extending into the digital space the sort of inspiration they can find in the store.
–Jennifer Brown and Tracey Kennedy are co-owners of Sydney homewares store The Vignette Room.
There is definitely a place for online shopping in my world. There has to be – most days I’m here behind my own counter serving, selling, being shop girl. On my days off (not that I am ever totally off, such is my obsession) I’m out and about scouring, sourcing or picking up stuff I have bought online.
We all live and work in a busy world where it seems a perfectly reasonable and sensible use of time to multi-task shopping, on the lounge with the laptop and glass of wine nearby while husband controls the television. I don’t watch that much TV anymore, my channel is the Wide Wide World of Web as Joy once called it in My Name Is Earl. I’m not always shopping, I’m also browsing, comparing my prices, looking at ‘pinteresting’ ideas. I’m trying to cut back though.
Sandy’s shop, Urban Rustic
So what’s a bricks and mortar store got over the online shopping experience? Well very importantly, you know exactly what you are going to get and when, the condition (it is what it is) and it’s right here, right now. Things are not always as they seem online.
I bought something on eBay once (a fabulous retro resin sculpture) which was great only it turned out to be half the size I was expecting. So not quite the bargain or the delightful unwrapping. Huh? Wha?… The glass of wine nearby may have been a factor in the lack of attention to detail. There is definitely something to be said for shopping with the object in hand, and said object not being alcoholic.
Sandy Cash
Come on, who hasn’t done this? Come to your senses people. Go outside. Pick it up. Feel it. The touch, the texture, being able to see the exact colour, the fabric, the fit, the weight, the scale, the smell. All the tactile senses which are not activated by pixels.
I started my shop, Urban Rustic, online and it still functions online, but my passion is for the reality; the walls, the shelves, all my collections coming together. I get so much more enjoyment from serving a contented customer, trading the stories and memories that come with vintage pieces. You don’t get that opportunity with an online transaction. All I get is anxiety until I know that one-off item is delivered safe and sound.
The big players have created an expectation that postage should be free; fine if you’re posting necklaces or books but for me vintage Pyrex (some patterns I can’t even find anymore), art glass and fine china? Nightmare. Forget about it. By the time I’ve weighed it, photographed it, described it, calculated postage and uploaded it, some lucky person has walked in, grabbed it and is on their happy way out the door.
I like being local too. As mentioned before, I sell one-offs. I’d rather see it safely out the door. I’ve met so many wonderful people who I now source things for, customers who’ve become friends and a complete change of pace to my once stressful busy life of broadcast design where I was glued to a screen and had to outsource most of my parenting.
Local businesses offer support, a discount if you’re nice and deserve it, information about an item’s origins and how to care for it and what might work well with it etc. In a nutshell, we offer the humanity. It’s a hard slog though, competing with today’s savvy internet shoppers.
So should bricks and mortar stores drop their prices to stay in line with online? Well, yes, if you can. But it’s a tough one. Obviously real stores have rent, electricity, multiple insurance policies, staff wages, superannuation, etc etc. There are so many expenses before you even stock it and open the door, that someone working out of their garage or warehouse doesn’t have. But are you getting exactly what you want, or think you want?
This has been bothering me for a while after a Facebook ‘friend’ had a rant about an overpriced crystal item in a local boutique homewares store. She says she went home and found it for half the price on the interweb. I kind of hope it was not exactly the same or arrived broken. The important factor people forget is the intellectual property this lady is putting out there. She is a very talented stylist and has, to use a now overused phrase, a ‘carefully curated collection’. You are being showed something lovely that you would not have come up with on your own. On the lounge. Looking at pixels. Alright, yes there is Pinterest but you’re not looking closely, touching, sensing, being in the zone. Knowing exactly.
We are all guilty of seeing something we love in a beautiful shop and going home to look for a cheaper version online. How clever we are. And I get it, we live in an expensive world. I do it too. It’s crazy how much stuff we seem to want and need to have and even more crazy how much it costs. As the saying goes, ‘a penny saved is a penny earned’.
But I like to think that my time is worth something too. My free time. Don’t you? That time spent googling to save a few dollars could be otherwise spent offline, being present in the world. Having extra time with family. You know. Life.
And let that local shopkeeper have the extra dollars if you can (rather than a faceless business who knows where) so they can still be there the next time you want to come strolling the streets for inspiration and a dose of retail therapy. If they call it retail therapy, surely it’s better to get immediate treatment rather than having to wait four-to-seven working days for your remedy to arrive?
Without getting too preachy, I hope that as we people of Earth get more and more homogenised and universal by the virtual world, that we will still value small, family-owned businesses who are working quite often out of sheer passion, rather than for profit, and encourage them to keep going for the greater good of the community.
Otherwise? Have you seen Wall-E? One global store, no competition. The local shopping strip which is so great to wander down of a weekend could die a sad, lonely slow death. You may not be able to look at beautiful decorator shops and get ideas for things to go home and google.
This is perhaps too black and white; online shopping opens up a virtual wonderful world for people in remote areas or have limited access to the shops and of course not everyone behind that PayPal account is in their pyjamas in the garage.
So how do bricks and mortar shops stay relevant? Be as competitive as you can afford to be. Offer the best happy, smiley service you possibly can and hope and trust that there will always be enough people to just be in the moment and get their retail fix immediately or just hate paying postage. And if they do have to go home and think about it well then, I guess that website wouldn’t hurt. I’ll be honest, I have bought things from Lee Mathews online when her store is across the street. Sometimes I just can’t actually get back there.
So yeah, I have to add that I will be working on reinventing my website soon, because even though I would like to host a technology rebellion where typewriters and Dymo labellers rule supreme (yeah right!) I want to be part of this real brave new world, browsing and swiping my life away. It’s #totesawesome.
–Sandy Cash runs Urban Rustic. She’d love you to visit her store in real life at Shop 1/ 371 Barrenjoey Road Newport Beach, NSW 2106.
In a world that has become increasingly online, Heidi McLeod, owner of Brisbane bricks and mortar store Espial, still very much believes the traditional boutique has a place in today’s age. And she should know, with her successful business now in its sixth year.
Heidi
“An online store isn’t far away for our distant customers, however, in our hearts we are traditional merchants who love to touch and feel our beautiful products and take pride in the service we provide. At the end of the day, we are busy having a great time doing what we do and our lovely clientele seem to enjoy it.”
With Espial meaning ‘to discover’ or ‘to unearth,’ Heidi’s stock of homewares, fashion and art is ever-changing as she falls in love with new designers and mixes them back in with her favourites. Hand picking hard-to-find lifestyle buys from local and international designers, she sources her products anywhere from markets to social media. “We’ve got clever creatives right here in our own backyard so we try to stock and support as many local designers as we can. I’m constantly scouring handmade markets or scrolling through my Instagram feed for beautiful trinkets and if I see something I like, I’ll make it my business to find out who the designer is and stock it for my customers.”
While Espial doesn’t have a style per say, Heidi does admit if a product’s colourful, she is automatically inclined to love it. “Colour is our religion, which is evident in our fashion and home decor collections. We love vibrant and surprising combinations that are never too serious and can be enjoyed by everyone.”
Espial is located at Samuel Village Shopping Centre, Camp Hill, Brisbane. For more information.
Trading since 2012, The Design Hunter started a new chapter this week, opening up a new, bigger store and design studio thanks to its continued success.
Melissa Bonney
Founded by designer Melissa Bonney, The Design Hunter is a unique concept that combines a shop featuring internationally sourced furniture and homewares, with a studio of highly experienced designers and stylists. However, due to her success, The Design Hunter has outgrown its current storefront. No longer being able to house both parts of the business in one space, she’s decided to move the business to two.
The new store
“It has been an exciting few years with growth in both areas of The Design Hunter,” explains Melissa. “We are really committed to our local community for our flagship store and have been lucky enough to secure a new larger space for our retail showroom right across the road at 316 Bronte Rd, Charing Cross. The much-loved original store will be transformed into a new studio for our team of designers, decorators and stylists.”
The new store
The new store has twice the amount of space compared to the original, giving The Design Hunter the opportunity to house a wider range of collections, including a hand-picked selection of Danish homewares; handwoven, fair-trade artworks from Ghana; Apothia candles from Italy; new Bonnie & Neil cushions; bespoke lighting and furniture pieces from around the world; artisan candles by Grove & Barrow; natural body and cleaning products by Bondi Wash and much more.
The new store opened for trading on Tuesday, and officially launches today (Thursday 29 May), open from 8.30am-to-8.30pm. Bubbles will be served from 4pm and there will be prizes and giveaways throughout the day, so pop in!
Bringing over 17 years of interiors and fashion experience, stylist and journalist Andrea Millar is today launching Australia’s newest concept store, Casa Boheme.
The online store will also be accompanied by a bricks-and-mortar counterpart, which opens in the Sydney suburb of Balmain on Saturday 26 April. Stocking a range of locally and internationally sourced homewares, fashion, gifts and accessories, as well as vintage and new furniture, Casa Boheme aims to be the shopping destination for the modern bohemian woman.
“I just felt it was time to bring my experience of gathering, hunting and creating together in one place,” explains Andrea. “I’ve searched to find things I really adore, bringing the ethical and beautiful together.”
Casa Boheme (which translates in Spanish and French to Bohemian House) will in true concept store style, feature a diverse range of lines that all have a bohemian chic thread in common.
“I saw an opportunity to offer Australians a taste of the concept store model that is so prevalent in other major cities, but is rather scarce in Sydney,” says Andrea. “The strength of the concept store model is that it offers a highly curated range of products that celebrate a lifestyle and is a break from the formula that drives so much of retail.”
