Global Online Furniture Interest
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Is the Traditional Furniture Store a Dying Breed?
September is a sad month for the furniture Industry with OFD going into voluntary administration after the death of the company's managing director. The business has been an upstanding entity for 35 years. Sleep city shut its doors earlier this year as well closing down a whopping 64 stores.
Difficult marketing conditions are playing havoc on the furniture industry. The furniture market is a ruthless arena and the survivors of the future will be the ones that can quickly change and adapt to a rapidly changing environment. For now, this means technology and the internet. These days if your not competitive online, you may as well throw in the towel. Whether you are an auction house dealing in second hand furniture or a new furniture store, if your not online, your competitors will knock you out of the scrummage in no time, if they haven't already done so. In this industry their is no room left for the dinosaurs.
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Who is Embracing Radical Change with Online Shopping and Mobile Technology Platforms?
Auction houses like Greys Online, Evens Clarke know full well that online auctions are imperative to their survival. They have embraced this technology and are doing wonderfully well. New furniture and office furniture retailers know that their customers are willing to buy online and are demanding the best quality and the best price. The only way to to this is to cut out the middle man, go straight to the factories, and get rid the enormous cost that comes along with having a physical furniture store.? Your shop window is your online presence. Thus, having a an online store that is easily navigated on all platforms (PC, Mac, tablets, phones, Ios, Android), highly visible online (google, bing etc), and has a fully integrated 'buy now' and delivery service is the key to staying afloat in today's market.
As one can see from the chart below, interestingly enough, although? global online interest in furniture has declined over the last several years, online interest for furniture and office furniture has actually increased in the Australian market. The furniture Industry is not dying, there certainly a market out there, and staying on top of technological change is the only way to give your customers what they want and stay in business!
?Australian Online Furniture Interest
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What about Ikea?
Ikea has always been known for innovation in their procedures and supply chains, but even they seem to be falling behind the times. It's exiting to see that they have published an 'app' on Android and Ios, but not having a 'buy now' functioning website may in time lead to their demise. For a forward thinking businesses, it is surprising that one still has to pay a visit to their physical store in order to purchase any goods. They seem to have all the supply chains in place to embrace the online market, but the? natural progression has yet to be entertained.
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Egans Asset Management
Egans has embraced the online world and moved from a traditional auction house to one that is almost entirely online. Their store front is there website and there physical location is more of large warehouse (factory) of stock and storage than a glossy show room. This keeps prices highly competitive, lead times short and their clients happy. Egans began thier journey simply as an office moving company. They started noticing that many of the businesses they moved had large amounts of furniture that they either no longer required, or wanted to store until a later date. Egans quickly moulded their business to offer clients a solution for managed storage and tracking as well as a process for their unwanted furniture.
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The Egans Product Stewardship Program
Over the years, this process has developed into highly sophisticated environmentally sustainable in-house solution for the redistribution of office furniture and business assets. Their unique 'Product Stewardship Program' entitled "Reuse, Resell and Recycle" enables an effective life cycle management of commercial furniture and fittings. "The best form of recycling is to reuse or resell the items" says Egans founder and managing director Andrew Egan. Reuse comes in the form of managed storage allowing clients to easily reuse their items as many times as required. Egans offers many resell options including online auctions, traditional on-site auctions, and repurchase. The company has a whole other side to the business, reselling workstations and office furniture to business that love the value add of quality second hand environmentally friendly stock. High quality office partitions like Schiavello and Haworth can easily be reconfigured and reinstalled into a new office in compliance with a floor plan.? "These workstations can be used again and again and still look fantastic".
The final Mantra of the Stewardship program is to recycle the goods that have truly reached their end of life and no longer have any resale or charitable value. Egans breakdown the non saleable goods in-house into raw components to then be recycled, reinvented and up-cycled into other products. The 3 cycle Stewardship program insures that minimal assets end up in Landfill and offer a complete solution to Egans clientele.
Often the solution to resell unwanted assets on behalf of the client is a popular option as proceeds from the sale can offset and alleviate some of costs associated with the relocation of the business. "Many companies offer 1 or 2 of the services that we provide, but our clients love the simplicity and piece of mind of having one company providing a solution for the entire process" says Egans General Manager James Foster. "There are a lot of companies out their that are just consultants, subcontracting the work out to others. Egans actually do the work themselves".
Source: http://egansofficefurniture.blogspot.com/2012/09/a-volatile-furniture-industry-online.html
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