EO, MD and co-founder, Brian Shanahan, announced his own resignation in late-April from the business he co-founded with Conrad Yiu, Mark Coulter and Adam McWhinney in 2011. Coulter, who returned to the business as COO following Kelly’s departure, is acting as interim CEO until a permanent replacement is found. Temple & Webster Group, which also owns online furniture retailer, Milan Direct, and is chaired by prominent businesswoman and retail identity, Carol Schwartz, added a wealth of industry experience to its board with the April appointment of Stephen Heath. The former MD and CEO of Fantastic Holdings Limited, Heath is a non-executive director of Temple & Webster Group and is working with T&W’s management team under a consulting agreement. After two earnings downgrades in as many months, shares in Temple & Webster, which listed on the ASX in December 2015, lost nearly 30 per cent of their value in April. Meanwhile, April also saw the Sydney-based company scrap its Zizo brand in an effort to refocus on building Temple & Webster into a household name. Zizo was the rebranded Australian e-commerce website of US furniture e-commerce giant, Wayfair, which Temple & Webster acquired in July last year, at the time dubbing it the ying to Temple & Webster’s yang. The company has lowered its short-term FY16 revenue guidance to $60-62 million and as of May 1 the Temple & Webster brand is being migrated to the technology platform of Zizo’s catalogue of 130,000 products. Despite the furore that has occurred in the business in recent months, Coulter, remains bullish on the future of Temple & Webster as it moves beyond a “transformative” 2016. “My plan is really to put in place the new strategy; it’s a completely different site,” Coulter said of the technology platform that Temple & Webster has moved to. “We’re focusing on making Temple Webster into the first place Australians turn to when shopping for their home. That’s really a strategy for the group; what we need to show is that the strategy is working. When we start delivering numbers, the market will follow. We’re not really chasing the share price. I tell my team not to even look at the share price.” While the market clearly holds a dim view of Temple & Webster’s future, Coulter, who will remain interim CEO for 12 months, by which time a replacement will be announced, said sentiment in the leadership team remains positive. “The internal team are committed to Temple & Webster and see the opportunity potential ahead of us. We have introduced some fresh blood into the management team. We just appointed a CMO, who just signed the contract yesterday, who should be starting in early July, who’s a very experienced digital marketer and digital specialist.” Wayfair a strategic play Coulter explains that there was a specific strategy behind last year’s Wayfair Australia acquisition that was aimed fast-tracking the evolution of Temple & Webster, which, as a membership-based retailer, had become overly reliant on email marketing. Coulter calls the Wayfair acquisition a, “sustainable strategy with Temple & Webster”. “We started Temple & Webster as a membership club knowing that that was a temporary business model. The flaw of membership clubs – too many emails, delivery times are too slow – we knew from day one. It was a way to get going, to get a brand and get access to good supply. We’d already started to build a more permanent catalogue features inside. “When Wayfair came along, it was right about the time we were about to kick-off building full-on e-commerce site for Temple & Webster. We thought, ‘why don’t we accelerate our plans and acquire Wayfair Australia’. That’s what kicked off the acquisition.” Coulter said that the hasty Zizo re-brand was necessitated by Temple & Webster not having permission to use the Wayfair name, yet also not being ready to migrate Temple & Webster to the superior Wayfair platform and rebrand it under the Temple & Webster name. “We continued that journey opening up the e-commerce site for Temple & Webster,” he explained. “It became apparent that having two open e-commerce stores both trying to be the first place Australians turn to shopping online was becoming increasingly stepping over ourselves. “For a bunch of reasons, we started to merge the businesses. Firstly, from an operations point of view, it’s simpler. Certainly from an SEO point of view, the Temple & Webster name was much better than a brand new domain, Zizo. We were getting much more search traffic for Temple & Webster already.” Essentially, this marked a consolidation of the two brands; Coulter is adamant that the Wayfair purchase was part of a broader plan. “The strategy, internally, was called ‘BOB’, which is ‘best of both’ worlds, continued Coulter. “It was literally taking the best of Temple Webster and the best of Wayfair. I don’t view it as closing the business, or shutting the business. The business is essentially there. We’re still using the platform. We’re still using all of the catalogue. It’s just been re-branded Temple & Webster. We’ve added in all the beautiful content that we do so well.” Access exclusive analysis, locked news and reports with Inside Retail Weekly. Subscribe today and get our premium print publication delivered to your door every week.