Brothers deliver on McPhails family furniture legacy in Wangaratta

McPhails in Wangaratta has battled through the death of its family patriarch and the Covid lockdowns to become a thriving business.

McPhails Furniture director and owner Casey McPhail, right, with his brother, fellow director and owner, Taylor McPhail.

Christmas 1996 was arguably the hardest in the history of the McPhail family, one of the biggest business names in the Victorian regional city of Wangaratta.

The family patriarch, Keith McPhail, a fourth-generation farmer who had started the city’s well-known McPhails Furniture business a quarter of a century earlier, lay in bed at home dying. He was only 50 years old.

Six months earlier Keith, a giant of a man who was larger than life in the town, had been diagnosed with incurable cancer.

“The day he found out was basically the last day he went to work,” says Keith’s second eldest son, Casey, who had joined McPhails a year earlier after celebrating his 22nd birthday.

“He didn’t want to know anything. I was running the shop then and I’d come home and say something, and he would just say ‘I don’t care. I don’t want to know. You work it out’.

“I think he would have just gone into a state of depression.”

In the days before Keith died on January 18, 1997, Casey recalls seeing his father for the last time.

“I thought ‘Shit, if he is going to die soon, I’d better go in there and see what he reckons I should do.’ The only thing he said to me was ‘You’re OK’. That was it. I didn’t need to do anything,” he says before a poignant pause.

Keith’s confidence in Casey has been fulfilled in the decades since his death, as McPhails has grown into a thriving furniture and homeware retailer selling products made from recycled timbers and reclaimed metal, serving customers across the country with its now booming online marketplace.

The business gained a strong online following with the introduction of a $59 flat-rate delivery fee at the height of the Covid pandemic.

It now services customers in Victoria, NSW, the ACT and those up to 1800km from its Wangaratta store in southeast South Australia (including Adelaide), and southeast Queensland (including Brisbane).

It is now owned and run by Casey McPhail and his younger brother Taylor, who is 17 years his junior. Taylor was only six when his father died. He joined the business in 2014 after competing a commerce/law degree.

Their 77-year-old mother Bev, who in 2007 handed over the reins of McPhails to Casey and his older brother Jason, is no longer involved in the business. But her legend lives on.

She was 48 when her husband died. But not once did she talk of giving the business away.

“If you met her you would understand why,” Taylor says.

Her sons have long lived by the mantra that if mum gives you sympathy, you are probably doing something wrong.

One of nine children, Bev lost her own mother to cancer when she was only 23 years old. Her ­father Brian, a Royal New Zealand Navy World War II veteran, will turn 100 in July. He only quit his farm a year ago.

Important skills

Taylor McPhail says his mother has taught him the important skills of cash management.

“She is a big one for saving. I’ve basically paid off the whole business and removed all the debt. Our main debt now is only in property,” he says.

“She taught me to continue to save it as you operate the business, to put cash aside weekly. So when you get the bills, you are sweet.”

But Bev has also been enormously supportive of her sons in their toughest times.

“Back when it was super tight four or five years ago, when you needed a five grand loan, she would just give you whatever you needed to make ends meet,” Taylor says.

But Casey says their mother has taught them one important trait above all else: resilience.

The Covid pandemic almost sounded the death knell for McPhail’s.

Casey and Taylor both mortgaged their houses and borrowed $500,000 to keep the business afloat as they were forced to close their bricks-and-mortar operations. Casey even called several of his farmer mates to see if he could get some McPhails staff jobs on tractors.

McPhails founders Keith and Bev McPhail

Taylor bought himself a log splitter so he could return to selling timber to survive.

“I always thought ‘What is the worst thing that could happen? I would have to go back and split wood?’ But it was probably as close to death as our dad would have felt when he got diagnosed with cancer, without dying. It was so deflating,” Taylor says.

“We had gone that hard for four years to make ends meet and put up with shit. The bank manager remembers the day I rang him and said ‘Chuck all the loans on hold. We are done’.

“We needed cash like air in our lungs. But then we sold a few things online and they were gone in 60 seconds.”

The three brothers immediately started doing online deliveries around the clock in an old 2007 model McPhails truck.

Over the next two years the business went from $900,000 a year in turnover and near closure to $22m a year by implementing the $59 flat rate delivery fee for customers. It also started advertising on Facebook.

“I was in year 11 boarding at Scotch College in Melbourne when Facebook came out. I basically grew up with it from the perfect age of learning it, so I evolved with it,” Taylor says.

They were also aided by the support of their bank manager at NAB, Neil Membrey, the cousin of Collingwood AFL footballer Tim Membrey.

“Neil goes above and beyond the role of a bank manager and has become a personal friend – he even comes to my kids’ birthdays,” Casey says.

He describes the secret sauce of the business as being one of the few players in the industry willing to deal with “ugly freight”. McPhails guarantees to deliver door to a customer’s door, even to clients as far afield as South Australia and Queensland, within a fortnight.

“It is the freight and logistics part and our ability to do deliveries of what they call ugly freight, which is furniture that is awkward to handle and fragile,” Casey says.

“We pack to ensure things don’t get damaged.”

Simple mottos

Casey and his brother also have intimate knowledge of all aspects of the McPhails business. The firm designs more than half its furniture and lives by simple mottos, like to never sell pine products because they crack.

“You only know that from experience,” Taylor says.

“Because we have been on the floor speaking to customers, when we go to China and Vietnam as buyers we know exactly what the customers want.”

Because of their 17-year age gap, Taylor has long viewed his older brother as a father figure. When their father died, Casey took his younger brother under his wing and now has four children of his own, including a daughter from a previous marriage.

McPhails Furniture director and owner Taylor McPhail with his daughter.

“When Taylor came into the business, I told him ‘You go your hardest and I will support you.’ There was no point in locking horns with him. I had had my crack at it and it was his turn,” Casey says.

“I’ve learned to keep out of his way. When he is on a mission, keep out of his way and don’t underestimate him – if he wants to get something done, it will get done.”

But Taylor is clear that he “couldn’t f..k things up either”.

“I’ve learned from Casey not to micro manage and to not expect too much out of people,” he says.

“You can’t expect people to put in as much as you put in. But most importantly, don’t be an arsehole.”

Going forward, McPhails’ new warehouse facility in Wangaratta will have a large role to play in streamlining operations, reducing unnecessary stock transfers and allowing more time for deliveries for the firm.

Before 2022, McPhails had only one showroom. It started 2025 with a 3000sq m extension of its current distribution facilities and another offsite warehouse of 2000sq m, bringing the storage ­facilities on hand up to 14,000sq m, plus their retail/showroom of a further 4000sq m.

But the brothers’ most important decision in recent years was to hire a new general manager, Dhan Michael, from the London-listed International Workplace Group six months ago, after going through several others.

One even stole from the business, before he was caught and immediately sacked.

Taylor admits the hire saved him from quitting the business.

“A year ago, I wanted out because we had no support. I could only take it to a certain level of operating by doing things myself,” he says. “It got really tiring. You never had a break. Every little issue came through me and it wears you down. Now with a better team around us, we have a new growth trajectory.”

McPhails also started investing in its own delivery trucks in 2022, when it only had four in the fleet. There will be 21 trucks joining this year.

The firm had its biggest month of all time in November 2024 despite the cost-of-living squeeze and poor consumer sentiment across the market. The month helped lift sales growth 25 per cent in the second half of 2024.

Further growth

McPhails is now forecasting growth of a further 40 per cent for 2025 to more than $30m in annual revenue. The workforce has doubled in the past six months, and the firm is now one the biggest employers in Wangaratta.

“With our new GM, we should go beyond $35m in revenue within 18 months,” Taylor says.

“We wouldn’t want to open another store. It will all be driven by online. The scalability of online is phenomenal.”

The brothers stress they would not say no to the right buyer coming along for the business one day, although a soft, informal sale campaign two years ago amounted to nothing.

“Potential buyers just don’t get how great it is living in the country,” Casey quips.

“It is for the greater good of Wangaratta that we have built this business. It is about more than money. The business has grown so much, but it’s like all businesses, they don’t go forever.”

His brother puts it more bluntly. “We wouldn’t flog it off for free. But if the right situation or whatever happened and it was right, we are traders. Personally I don’t hold sentimental value for much.”

For now, their father’s legacy lives on at McPhails.

Casey remembers his father’s mantras, which he has put into practice for the past 27 years and will continue to until the day he stops working.

“Dad always worked hard, and expected people to work hard around him. If we had to work seven days a week, it was seven days a week,” he says.

“But it was also his smarts. He was always about being one step ahead of the opposition.”