affic, through to the onsite customer experience and optimisation, then right through to the majority of fulfilment. Freedom fulfils homewares out of store, but also has a dropship program that includes about 160–170 vendors and 50,000 SKUs. Inside Retail: The dropship channel has exploded over the past couple of years. It sounds simple, but I imagine it’s incredibly complex to make work. PM: Absolutely – especially in a heritage Australian retail brand. You need an engaged business behind you to achieve something of this scale. When I first started, our core focus was getting the omnichannel proposition right, making sure customers could move seamlessly between online and in-store. It’s great when customers check out online, and many do, but we’re also there to drive foot traffic into stores, which still accounts for around 80 per cent of company turnover. Before we launched dropship, online sales were about 17–18 per cent. The objective behind dropship was that Freedom is a well-established, trusted brand in Australia. Customers can go into a store, speak to a salesperson and have a conversation. But within four walls, you can only fit so much product – stores don’t have rubber walls. Online, you don’t have that constraint. We wanted to create an endless aisle, but within our design aesthetic. Our goal is not to be everything to everyone. Freedom has a distinct handwriting, and everything in the dropship program has to align to that. We started from a low base, but it has grown quickly. Our core customer already knows and trusts the brand, and dropship gives them another channel – and a much broader range – in which to engage with Freedom. IR: That trust piece is interesting. When you open up to third-party vendors, there’s a balance between maintaining standards and expanding the range – especially in furniture. How do you pull it off? PM: It is, and that was our first major decision: whether to be a marketplace or a dropship channel. With a marketplace model – like eBay or Kogan – the customer engages directly with the vendor. That wasn’t a risk we were prepared to take. From day one, we wanted to own the end-to-end customer experience. If there’s a bad delivery, we don’t want customers dealing with a third party – we want to own it, fix it, and ensure Freedom remains a trusted brand. So we chose a dropship model rather than a marketplace. We set the price, we own the last mile, and we handle any customer issues directly. Whether a customer buys a first-party product or a third-party dropship product, the experience should be identical. A big part of our success with that has been building strong partnerships with our vendors. We engage with them regularly, share data, and talk to one another constantly. It’s very much a win-win relationship. IR: Omnichannel gets talked about a lot, but I imagine it’s even more important for you. Customers might see something online and then go in-store, or vice versa. How do you make that relationship work? PM: We’ve implemented two key strategies. First, if a customer visits a store and speaks with a salesperson, nine times out of ten they’ll leave with a quote. They get a hard copy, but behind the scenes, we also save that quote to their online account. If they go home, discuss it, or shop around, they can log in and check out easily – either that day or within 14 days – without rebuilding their basket. The second initiative relates to dropship products. Around 10 per cent of our dropship sales happen in-store, even though the product isn’t physically there. We built a custom module that sits on our in-store point-of-sale system. If a customer has seen something online, a salesperson can show them the product, walk them through the features, and help them check out in-store. Internally, we call this NLS, or “Never Lose a Sale”. IR: Finally, what does 2026 look like for you – particularly as AI and search behaviour continue to evolve? PM: I don’t think there’s ever been a year without chaos in digital retail, but that’s why we all love it. We’ve built a strong tech stack for omnichannel and dropship, and now it’s about optimising it and putting it on steroids. Onsite, our next focus is generative AI. We’re currently building a Q&A-style experience on key product pages so customers can have a conversation about product knowledge or comparisons without leaving the site. Over the next two to five years, this will continue to evolve rapidly. A major focus for the next 12 months is preparing for LLM shopping agents. Is your data structured correctly? Are you discoverable? Do you have the right content? If you’re not ready, you’ll be left behind very quickly. Download Inside Retail’s Top 50 People in E-Commerce, presented by Australia Post, in full here.