RETAILER PROFILE: FACTORY BLINDS

Amid a population base of around 120,000 people in a local catchment area that includes Launceston and the Tamar Valley, the Northern Midlands and from St Helens on the East Coast through to Devonport in the North West, Factory Blinds’ showroom is located in the high profile Invermay area, which is known for building and home furnishing businesses. The business also operates a workroom located in the warehousing suburb of South Launceston.

Factory Blinds’ co-founder and proprietor Gary Streets has been involved in the window furnishings industry in one way or another since 1984. “I began my future career as the Home Furnishings Division manager for Myer Launceston, which involved all of the home furnishings departments including homewares, Manchester, furniture, lighting, white goods and soft furnishings (curtains). I resigned from Myer Launceston and with my wife Valerie we started up a manufacturers’ agency, trading as Home Décor Agencies, on 1 May 1989, servicing all of Tasmania. The main principals that we represented were H&N Fabrics, KJ Textiles, Rowe Fabrics, Kaldor Fabrics, Bradsal Curtain Linings, Drapery Hardware, Brella and a number of other curtain and upholstery wholesalers.”

To complement the agency business, 1993 saw the Streets move into the wholesale manufacturing and supply of made-to-measure curtain tracks, bonded and roller blinds, vertical blinds and padded pelmets.

In 1995 they negotiated with Bradsal Linings to distribute curtain linings statewide from a warehouse in Launceston, carrying up to 300 rolls of lining in stock at any given time.

It soon became apparent that there were limited opportunities for growth as a manufacturers’ agent and small wholesaler, so in early 1997 the business began a transition into retail. “Most of our principals asked that we continue to represent their product ranges in Tasmania so, to keep the wholesale and retail operations at arm’s length, we registered an alternate retail trading name, Factory Blinds.”

As the calendar flips to 1 May 2019, Streets now looks back on 30 years since Home Décor Agencies was founded and 22 years since the business evolved into Factory Blinds. These days Factory Blinds’ target market is the mid-range, domestic, made-to-measure retail window furnishings market, he says. And despite the growth of online shopping, the business remains proudly “bricks and mortar” and 100% customer service focussed.

“Every aspect of our business is oriented around how we can best achieve and deliver the highest standard of customer service at all times. We have a healthy respect for the online market, for the bulk discounters, for the ready-made market and the commercial market, but we don’t fear or envy them! They have their customer base and we have ours.”

“If you choose to be in retail, as we do, then you must continue to excel in customer service standards and product knowledge. We are not a price orientated business. We take the time to talk with each customer to find out what it is they think they want and then we work towards offering solutions that will achieve that end. Just because a customer thinks and says they want a specific option doesn’t mean that they actually understand what they are asking for. It is up to our staff to ask relevant questions and present a range of options that then allows the customer to make a considered decision.”

He believes a critical factor in successful customer service is selecting staff with the right personality for retail. “We can teach job skills but we can’t teach personality. Our sales staff have initial contact with our customers and our installers usually have the last contact. Each contact with a customer must leave a positive and lasting impression on the customer.”

Factory Blinds now employs 16 staff across sales, admin, makers (blinds and curtains), storeman and marketing functions.

“As TAFE no longer offer relative courses, trying to find skilled or experienced workers is nigh on impossible, so I tend to recruit older staff who can bring experience with them. Most training is now provided in-house and where possible we ensure that we multi-skill our staff. We find that older staff tend to be more settled in life, better in their decision making processes and they want to be there. Our installers are qualified tradespeople and we fine tune their job-specific skills while on the job. We keep our employees’ certifications current and do refresher courses where applicable, such as Working at Heights, White Card, Working with Vulnerable People etc.”

“We manufacture most of our finished goods in our own workroom. By manufacturing in-house, we have a better and more consistent standard of quality control, we are able to find a solution for those tricky jobs and we’re not limited or restricted to product ranges offered by the finished goods wholesalers.”

The business’ four key product groups of roller blinds, curtains, honeycomb blinds and plantation shutters generate up to 80% of turnover. In its workroom, curtains, roller, vertical and panel blinds and Ziptrak patio blinds are manufactured. Meanwhile, Streets describes sunscreen roller blinds and sheer curtains as “the window furnishings equivalent of ‘Do you want fries with that?'”

“They have consistently been strong add-on sales,” he says.

“With curtains, we predominantly promote and sell separately lined made-tomeasure curtains with sewn-in pleats. We direct customers away from single fabric options where at all practical, as we prefer to promote the benefits of insulation over price point.”

“As a business, we select and support Australian based national brand wholesalers as our first option. We purchase brand name products from suppliers such as Rollease Acmeda, Uniline, Shaw Fabrics, Louvolite and Texstyle Fabrics for our internal blind systems. For our external patio blinds we manufacture the Ziptrak patio blind system and prefer to use Vistaweave screen fabrics. We support Wilson Fabrics, Nettex, Basford Brands, the Dunlop Group, Slender Morris, Warwick and the Charles Parsons group with curtain fabric ranges while SAN supply our curtain tracks and accessory ranges.”

“In our smallish population area we need to cater to the full market but we do mostly focus on the domestic market of new home builds and renovators and we also have a regular government clientele.” Large scale commercial projects are however not a focus for the business, he says, adding: “little fish are sweet.”

“We offer a free measure and quote service to every customer in our catchment area and we will travel to that customer’s home to consult, regardless of distance and whether it be for one kitchen blind or a house lot of curtains. From little acorns big oak trees grow.”

Given this ethos, it’s not surprising that much of the business’ marketing is driven by word of mouth referrals. “We’ve been able to cut our paid advertising expenses back by two thirds over the past 10 years because it is the non-paid, word of mouth referrals that bring in the most business,” he says, adding that Factory Blinds also supports a number of local sporting clubs, schools and charities with donations, which help cement its local community presence.

However, over the course of 30 years, Streets says he has deployed most of the available marketing tools at some point or another.

“For the past 10 years I have focussed our advertising dollar on radio advertising. It is cost effective, easy to manage and has proven time and time again to be the best medium to produce strong positive and timely results. I shied away from social media for a long time because I didn’t understand it. Social media is here to stay and you’ve got to go with the flow, so three years ago I set myself the task of learning about the strengths and weaknesses of social media marketing. Two years ago I employed a new staff member for one day per week to focus wholly and solely on getting our website up and operating to an effective standard and then to build a social media profile. That person is now employed 2.5 days per week and the hours will continue to increase over time.”

“Statistics show that more and more transactions are being made through mobile phones. The negative aspect of that is that most purchases made are for low value, convenience items like pizza, but the more important and positive aspect is that phone apps are being used more and more for research on big ticket items. You may not be able to judge where the leads are coming from but if you are not on social media and don’t have an effective web site then you do so at your own peril.”

Boasting consistent and strong growth pattern since it was first established, the 10 years since the Streets moved into new and larger premises in 2009 have seen turnover triple and gross profit improve by 30%. The company is clearly a stayer and a winner. Streets believes those tried and tested tenets of customer service and product knowledge are largely responsible for its success.

“Apart from that, I think our point of difference in the market place may be the quality of our staff and our back up service when things go wrong. Our staff are trained and empowered to make decisions in those situations and by doing so we are able to reduce customer anxiety levels pretty quickly. All of our competitors run similar product ranges to what we do. We know we’re not the cheapest in the marketplace but we have a good track record of about an 80% conversion rate on most day to day quotes.”