For nearly forty years, Country Road’s homeware category has been a small but punchy sliver of the overall brands’ yield. But that’s changed over the last four years.
According to the brand’s general manager of Home Ty Symonds (pictured), the category’s sales have doubled since FY20.
“We've had record breaking sales for four years now in a row,” he says. “And the great news is that's actually been quite consistent and measured. Our average year-on-year growth has been around about 11 per cent since FY20.”
Alongside this growth, the sales contribution of Home to the brand’s overall sales has also grown, lifting from around seven per cent in FY20 to nine per cent in FY24. Symonds says this can grow to as high as 13 per cent during key gifting moments like Mother’s Day or Christmas, with gift options for every room of the house, as well as the backyard and pets.
In fact, the Country Road logo mug is the second-biggest unit driver overall, just behind the heritage sweat.
Indeed, getting to this point is not without a few key tweaks. The first major change was onboarding Symonds himself in the first place as head of design for Home in January 2020, following similar roles at Kmart and Blackmilk Clothing. He was then promoted to general manager in February 2023.
The next tweak was timelines. When Symonds commenced his role five years ago, Country Road’s Home category followed monthly drops which aligned with apparel. Symonds says this created a very high reliance on fashion and the markdowns that could ensue.
“It was also out of step with the homeware market, having monthly drops,” he says. “So we've now built a really good, strong base. We've grown our core programs from 30 per cent to 60 per cent, which has just basically come from reorganizing our product drops to better reflect how a customer shops from where each season.”
Essentially, this is two main drops - one at the beginning of each season and then topped up by a high-season requirement. In winter, Symonds says, this could be winter weight textiles, throws, faux furs. In summer, this could be high summer gifting such as beach towels or picnic items.
By doing this, Symonds says it has made the Home category a more profitable business because it doesn’t follow the monthly markdown schedule like the typical apparel category would.
“And then there’s the trend perspective, which is obviously important for any business. We tend to talk about the difference between trend and fad, and we reject fads. Because of that, it does mean our design team and planning team can look and plan products more around our customer - our lifestyle - while obviously being mindful of the market and our competitors, but just really staying focused on our own way forward.
Another key insight is that the home department indexes higher in terms of online sales compared to the Country Road business overall. Symonds confirms the sales mix for home is around 40 per cent online and 60 per cent in-store, while the brand overall sits more around 30 per cent for online.
“We generally therefore house the bulk of our Home inventory in our distribution centre, and try to keep stock builds and store as lean as possible. So that way, we are keeping the demand and availability there for when people shop online, and then just sending out the stock that's really just required to stores as they need it.”
The reason they can do this is partly because the Home category is still small in the grand scheme of things. Not all Country Road stores stock the home range, and the range is still relatively limited.
“The full range only exists in nine stores,” Symonds says. “So if you think about that and the incredible growth we've seen, it just underscores the potential.”
The other key step was finetuning the team overseeing the category, with many of these roles working between Home and Country Road's core fashion category. When Symonds stepped in as head of design, his team was fairly small. But this has now doubled, too, four years on.
“We have industrial designers, textile designers and technical designers, as well as dedicated planning functions. What we have done over the years is sort of bolstered that, grown that, but then also brought in specialized support in VM and styling.
“This has been particularly important as we've started to elevate our styling and our presentation to inspire our customers. So as we want to look better in store, we want to look better online and in our photography. We never had that dedicated support previously.”
Part of the presentation shift ahead, Symonds says, is shifting the Country Road home section in-store closer to the front. The team has already been testing this in select stores, including Brighton in Victoria, Oxford Street and Paddington in Sydney, and its regional store in Ballarat.
From there, the next opportunity is standalone retail.
“We know that we have carved out a unique position in the market for premium but attainable homewares,” he says. “We know we also, as a division, play a really important role to the lifestyle aspect of the Country Road brand. And that will continue to be important.
“The demand that we're seeing and our growth ambitions for this category are essentially driving an expectation, you could say, to experience Country Road Home at its fullest expression.”