Online furniture brand Brosa is ramping up its marketing activities and expanding into adjacent product categories, such as outdoor furniture and home decor, as it seeks to capitalise on the rapid increase in online shopping during Covid-19. The Melbourne-based business was recently announced as the official furniture partner of this year’s Melbourne Food and Wine Festival. Festival ambassador, MasterChef winner Diana Chan, has already started promoting the brand on her Instagram account
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And later this year, Brosa will launch a slew of new outdoor furniture products after seeing some of the items it previously offered sell out in a matter of days.
“Outdoor is a great opportunity. It’s not as difficult of a purchase decision as indoor furniture, but there is still a lot of consideration, and there aren’t a lot of great options around,” Ivan Lim, Brosa’s co-founder and CEO, told Inside Retail.
“We’ve got aspirations to more than double that part of the business.”
100 per cent growth
As a private company, Brosa doesn’t share financial figures, but Lim said the business grew more than 100 per cent last financial year, putting it in line with other online furniture retailers, such as Temple & Webster, which reported an 85 per cent increase in revenue in FY21.
“Our growth rates are very similar to all the leading players. We are comparable, if not slightly faster,” he said.
Brosa’s rise has been fueled both by existing customers, who increased their order frequency and average order value during the pandemic, and new customers, who sought out online furniture retailers when stores were closed.
And with e-commerce penetration in the furniture category still well behind other retail categories like fashion, Lim believes the brand is in a good position to capture even more of the market in the years ahead.
“There’s still so much growth, and we are really fortunate that we built a leading position as far as a digital-first experience goes for home and living,” he said.
Curated range
Meaning Icelandic for ‘smile’, Brosa was founded in 2014 with a mission to make it easier for customers to create a home they love.
The business differentiates itself by doing its own deliveries, which enables customers to track their order from the moment they click the buy button and take advantage of ‘white glove’ services, such as having their old furniture removed.
It expanded offline in 2017, with the opening of its first bricks-and-mortar showroom in Melbourne, followed by another location in Sydney in 2020. And it offers styling services, which enable it to gain deeper insights into its customers and personalise their experience.
“Technology for us is not having an e-commerce website. It’s always been the infrastructure that we built the entire business on,” Lim said.
Backed by leading venture capital firms, including Airtree Ventures, Bailador Technology Investments and Perennial, Brosa has spent the last two years investing in its technology capabilities and strengthening its supply chain.
The business hired additional team members in China and India to ensure its purchase orders received priority during the global supply chain crisis. Now, they’re working closely with furniture makers to source materials for a range of new products.
Besides the launch of outdoor furniture, Brosa is also looking to expand its home decor range and offer more environmentally friendly furniture options. However, it’s not going to become a mass market player that sells “every product under the sun”, Lim said.
“We’ve always taken a curated approach. If anything, over the last two years, we’ve actually continued to sharpen our range,” he said. “We’ve reduced our range but grown by introducing new products we know our customers want.”