both corporate and independently owned and operated furniture stores. “The middle of January was probably the worst time to open because the sale period had pretty much finished and customers were getting ready for back to school, and back to work – those sort of things,” Fantastic CEO, Stephen Heath told Inside Retail PREMIUM. “It provided us with a good opportunity to get the store open, get the staff trained, get them used to the system, so it was good time to open from that respect – it wasn’t flat out. “The first week ironically was probably our busiest week on the back of January sales, so we caught the major part of that traffic, and between now and then, it’s been pretty consistent and meeting our expectation, given that we haven’t really done a lot of promotion of the brand,” Heath said. “It’s a trial – I’ll know more in six months.” Ashley Furniture’s first taste of Australia was a store in store concept in the Le Cornu store, also in Adelaide. “We are trialling this one in Adelaide first and we’ll see how that goes. Before this one we had a store in store concept in Le Cornu. That was about 1300sqm and that has gone very well and continues to do well, so we extended that trial into a full store. The Australian products have some crossover with the American range. “There are some pieces that are coming out of the US range, but at the same time there is a lot of product that is made for the Asian and Mediterranean markets. “Everything we have in our shop is targeted at families or singles in apartments. There are all styles, looks and feels – we’re just appealing to different tastes.” One of the reasons for bringing Ashley Furniture here is because the company has a similar structure to Fantastic. “They are an integrated business as is Fantastic Furniture where they have manufacturing, look after their own logistics and have their own retail stores. We’ve had a relationship with them for a while and we’ve been sharing ideas on vertical integration,” says Heath. “Their business model is similar to ours and it was an opportunity for us to look at a business that we could expand into the middle market because the brands we have at the moment don’t effectively target that part of the market… it’s one supplier, one retail brand, so it is a very simple business model.” IbisWorld predicts modest growth in the home furniture market in the next five years. “As the population grows, the furniture market grows,” Heath said. “Furniture is a big part of every household so it makes sense that the furniture industry will grow as the population continues to grow, and anything midmarket is where the growth will come from.” This story first appeared in Inside Retail PREMIUM issue 2040. To subscribe, click here.