Living Edge

With people spending a lot more time at home and looking to lift their decorating game, furniture brand Living Edge is riding a new wave of demand for quality and good design.

In the world of high-end furniture, there are two types of sales: contract and residential. Residential, or retail, is ordinary people like you and me who buy a new sofa, coffee table, some dining chairs, or a light fitting or two. It can be a significant purchase for an individual, and involve hours of deliberation and a substantial amount of a sales consultant’s time. Contract is office, hospitality and institutional fitouts and the like. That’s where someone might purchase 100 sofas or 1000 desks – or in the case of the Commonwealth Bank, 17,000 Herman Miller Aeron chairs with the stroke of a pen. Contract, understandably, is where the big money is and where most high-end furniture sellers have traditionally focused their efforts. But due in large part to COVID-19, the balance is starting to shift.

Living Edge’s Melbourne showroom

The Living Edge furniture retail brand was founded in 2000 originally with a focus on residential furniture sales. In 2002, when the company acquired the local Herman Miller distribution business, it switched its attention to the more lucrative contract business. The US-based Herman Miller is a specialist in office furniture and workstations (as well as mid-century classics from designers such as Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson and Isamu Noguchi), and Living Edge rode the boom in Australian office construction with some significant multimillion-dollar fitouts. Retail sales were just the cream on the pie.

In 2009, the contract side of Living Edge was 89 per cent of its total business. But by the beginning of this year residential had grown to the point where it is 27 per cent and, according to the company, it’s grown by another 10 per cent since March. People are investing more on their home interiors as they spend more time in them, thanks to Coronavirus lockdowns. And to be fair, some of that growth came from sales of office chairs for people working from home. But it also came from new sofas and armchairs and coffee tables and lamps as people began to see the value in quality furniture, especially if they were going to be spending a lot more time with it.

Lambert & Fils; Radiofonografo (special edition in Canaletto walnut) by Brionvega

Jo Mawhinney, head of retail at Living Edge, also attributes the growth in retail to the introduction of a Design Studio for residential customers. “It’s like a formalisation of the old house visit, where you would take fabric samples and so on to someone’s house and go and assist a client just to make sure their sofa isn’t going to be too big, or that it’s the right colour,” she says. “Up until now it’s been mostly a word of mouth service, but we have just really started to market it.”

The service, Mawhinney says, is for people who don’t necessarily want to employ an interior designer but need some guidance. “They’re time poor and they just want some help. They haven’t got the time to do the research, where our guys are expert in product and can do all of that – and make it quite a nice process.”

Living Edge chief executive Aidan Mawhinney says residential orders through the Design Studio service have had a huge impact on the business. “We have seen orders come through for $50,000 to $200,000 for a home set-up, which is a lot of money. So there is definitely a propensity for people who want to spend more and decorate their homes. And luckily we haven’t really been affected by any issues with our manufacturers in Europe with shutdowns and so on, so we’ve been able to properly service those needs.”

Husband and wife Aidan and Jo Mawhinney actually met on the job. Jo has been working with Living Edge for more than 18 years, apart from a brief stint at rival retailer Space Furniture in the mid-2000s, and is one of the company’s original employees. The couple met in 2006 on a buying trip to Europe. Aidan, then Jo’s superior at work, made sure she was travelling separately so that he could avoid being stuck next to a colleague on a long flight and have to spending it talking about business. “But we quickly realised we liked the same things, and it was a love of design and product that brought us together,” he says. “We are just so aligned on things; we just live and breathe the business.”

Eames Lounge in mohair by Herman Miller

But it almost never happened. Not long after their first business trip together, the Global Financial Crisis hit, and Living Edge was an eventual casualty. It was placed into voluntary administration in 2010, with its major shareholder and original founder, Peter Griffin, removed on the same day. With debts in the millions, and corporate and retail customers who had placed deposits on goods and were not certain they would get the goods they’d ordered or their money back, the company was thrown a lifeline from Herman Miller, which agreed to acquire the business.

“When the company went belly-up you didn’t know if you were going to see your colleagues again, and I thought I was going to lose my house and my money and I was stuck in Europe at the time because of the ash cloud [from the eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland], but then one day Jo messaged me and asked me if I wanted to go out to dinner,” Aidan says. “We got married a year and a half later.”

After the GFC, Living Edge management refocused its contract business with an expansion of more brands, and also looked for more brands for the residential business as a buffer against another downturn. By 2016 the senior management team had completed a buyout of the company from Herman Miller, and new showrooms were opened in Brisbane and Perth, and Melbourne late last year. “We launched the Melbourne showroom and relaunched our website at around the same time, and then we had to close Melbourne not long after it opened due to COVID,” says Aidan.

Unlike the luxury fashion industry, high-end furniture businesses have been slow to embrace e-commerce. When the goods you’re selling take months to be delivered, the immediacy of the internet isn’t really such a big deal. But if there’s one retail lesson that has come from COVID-19, it’s that while customers are quite happy to buy goods online, they want them delivered as soon as possible. According to Aidan Mawhinney, the digital transformation of Living Edge is the other key factor that has seen its retail sales grow exponentially.

: Mass Table and Bash Vessel by Tom Dixon

“When we started our e-commerce store in 2014, we did it very minimally and were really just selling Aeron chairs,” he says. “But then we thought, if we are trying to be industry-leading in a physical sense with our showrooms, then we have to do that in a digital sense as well. We looked around at the industry and we thought there was no one who was a clear leader in e-commerce in furniture, so we saw that as a massive opportunity.”

At the end of last year, online sales accounted for less than 10 per cent of all retail sales, but they’re up by about 300 per cent since the shutdown began, according to Aidan. “E-commerce is very capital intensive and we are uploading about 50 new products every week, with a big backlog to go. And we are working with our suppliers to ship them directly from their warehouses so that we don’t have to purchase millions of dollars’ worth of stock and have it sit in our own warehouse hoping someone will buy it.”

Aidan and Jo Mawhinney hope their online store will make Living Edge a leading global design company and they still think Australia has space for more stand-alone stores. They are looking at smaller store footprints, or branded pop-up stores, in upmarket suburbs that could work as feeder stores to their large showrooms. “Not everyone will travel to Alexandria [in Sydney], and we are seeing that people want to shop more locally and within a small radius from where they live. I hate the phrase double down but that’s what I think we should be doing now, because what we are seeing in retail sales at the moment would support that.”

Spending time with Jo and Aidan, it’s easy to see their passion for furniture, design and retail – it’s all they talk about. They literally eat, sleep and breathe it, and, says Jo, most of their ideas for company initiatives come from their morning walks. As for their succession plan – they’re it. “We’ve been examining our business and we realised we’re actually living our succession plan,” says Aidan. “We quite enjoy this business as a lifestyle, and that whole lifestyle of going over to Europe and participating in design fairs and meeting the people who are your friends and who you do business with; it’s just a nice life for us.

“I’ve always been passionate about the company and now the two of us, this is the best life. If we sold it we don’t know what we would do.”