Online furniture and homewares retailer, Temple & Webster, will open a physical space, according to co-founder, Adam McWhinney, admitting the premium pureplay has begun drafting retail concepts that are “pretty out there”. Temple & Webster was founded in 2011 by Brian Shanahan, Conrad Yiu, Mark Coulter, and McWhinney, with its proposition based around offering consumers “shoppable editorial”. Backed by Macquarie Capital, it has more than 100,000 members, and in August wa
as rumoured to be planning to sell a strategic stake in the business in the hope a sale would attract a cash injection to boost revenue to $150 million a year. A buyer has not yet been confirmed.
Speaking about the subscription-based website’s business model in Sydney this week McWhinney said, “As a pureplay, although clearly we’ll be opening a store next year, the way that we try and serve the consumer is that we will put product together that goes together, that you may not know about,” McWhinney said.
“We have stylists and interior designers that work with Temple & Webster to put stuff together. We have beautiful stuff put together nicely, so typically people buy three to four items when they check out. That’s what I am talking about by ‘editorialise’. We don’t have sales staff, we don’t have stores, you can’t go and pick it up…yet.”
Following the announcement, McWhinney was coy about the online retailer’s bricks and mortar plans.
“We sell big things, we sell couches, we sell dining tables, we sell everything that you could want to put in your home and we know that 95 per cent of retail occurs in the real world. But, there’s also a big market for consumers buying online and we intend to stitch that up pretty comprehensively. We would be mad not to consider taking our brand into stores or into some real world experience.
“People want to sit on the barstool, lay on the cushion, they want to touch and feel things and we know that, so it’s just a matter of time.
“From a brand perspective and our positioning and the promises we make to the consumer I would say pop up stores are more unlikely than likely.
“The retail concepts that we’ve got, they’re pretty out there, and we have to figure out how we could make them work in terms of all the challenges a normal retailer has – having the right product, at the right price, in the right place – and that’s hard to do.
“We’d be silly to think that we could turn retail on its head, but it’s certainly something that we’ll look at, definitely.”
This story first appeared in Inside Retail PREMIUM issue 2028. To subscribe, click here.
