Adapting to the Customer Journey(s) with Sam Viney, Lounge Lovers

Michelle Lomas: In the market for a new couch? What is it that influences your purchase? Is it the design? How about the material used? Is sustainability a factor for you or is comfort more important? What about the delivery? Does it need to be Australian Made? Turns out there's a lot that goes into making a decision to buy a couch as my next guest will attest.

Michelle Lomas: Sam Viney is the CEO of Lounge Lovers. The company was founded by Derek Kerr with the mission to give customers access to great looking furniture at exceptional value. Initially launching as an online only store, the demand to touch and test lounge lovers, high quality, affordable items, fast, increased, and to meet the needs of its customers.

Michelle Lomas: Lounge Lovers opened eight stores across New South Wales, VIC, Queensland, and SA. Sam was brought onto the business two years ago to take this fast-growing startup and transform it into the omnichannel business it is today. Having worked for various retail companies, including the powerhouse Aldi brand, Sam was surprised to find that the world of lounge shopping was a little different to what he was expecting.

Michelle Lomas: Listen on to find out more.

Michelle Lomas: Sam, thanks for joining us today.

Sam Viney: Thank you. It's exciting to be here and the first time I've ever been on a podcast, so apologies if I'm terrible.

Michelle Lomas: I'm excited to be the first. You're gonna be excellent and don't worry, it's all edited. It's not live.

Sam Viney: Perfect.

Michelle Lomas: So, uh,

Sam Viney: Am I allowed to swear?

Michelle Lomas: You're allowed to say whatever pops into your head.

Sam Viney: Excellent. Great.

Michelle Lomas: There's some recent news. Can I say congratulations?

Sam Viney: You can say congratulations.

Michelle Lomas: New newly appointed CEO of Lounge Lovers. Very exciting.

Sam Viney: Yeah. Look it's exciting. It's been quite the journey there. I've been there two and a half years, but it feels it feels like 10 years at least.

Michelle Lomas: Yep.

Sam Viney: And yeah, it's just been great to take it to the next level of our growth.

Michelle Lomas: Lots to talk about in terms of the success of Lounge Lovers, the story, how you guys are going from a marketing perspective. But why don't we first start off with maybe a bit of an introduction to yourself, introduce yourself to the listeners and where you've come from and -

Sam Viney: Yeah. Sure. I'm Sam Viney and I'm the CEO of Lounge Lovers now. Interesting background for somebody finding themselves running a retailer. I actually started in the creative advertising world way back in the early two thousands when it was all about TV ads and press ads and magazines and all that sort of stuff.

Sam Viney: Makes me sound really old. So worked across a multitude of different accounts in my time in the ad sector. Stumbled across a little brand called Aldi.

Michelle Lomas: Just a tiny little one.

Sam Viney: Actually, it was a lot smaller back then. I was at BMF, the ad agency, and started working on the Aldi account in 2008.

Michelle Lomas: You were very small then.

Sam Viney: Yeah, it was about I back then would've been just over a hundred stores and I think they're about 600 now, so

Michelle Lomas: Yeah.

Sam Viney: Yeah. Very different time. Very different place. But absolutely loved the world of retail. Particularly at that stage, the supermarket category.

Sam Viney: It's a category that everybody's involved in every day. Really.

Michelle Lomas: Yeah.

Sam Viney: And it was great working with a brand like Aldi, which has a different point of difference in the market. Everyone knows Coles and Woolworths and it's the default for everybody.

Michelle Lomas: What a time to be working for Aldi as well, when you know you've had that monopoly. Not a monopoly, I should say, a duopoly for so long. And incomes Aldi, I remember what a shakeup.

Sam Viney: Yeah. Look, it was great. Really interesting to really believe in the mission of a brand and what it was doing for not just Aldi shoppers. Truth be told, it was actually the wider supermarket category because yeah, Coles and Woolworths had to ultimately respond to this new entrant from overseas.

Sam Viney: And from a marketing and advertising perspective, it was super cool. I found myself at Amart Furniture spent a about a year there, COVID hit and threw everything into sort of chaos for wanting better expression. And yes we started off that period thinking that it was the end of times as far as retail went and that the that the world was ending.

Sam Viney: And oddly enough, the exact opposite happened. Sales shot up through the roof.

Michelle Lomas: Yeah.

Sam Viney: For retailers, particularly furniture retail.

Michelle Lomas: Yeah.

Sam Viney: And that was the time where I made the move back to Sydney over to the Lounge Lovers and and yeah, I'll tell you what it was like riding a rocket ship at times as far as just the amount of change in the growth in the business and some of the challenges that you go through.

Sam Viney: COVID was a weird experience for everybody, but anyone who worked in furniture retail, saw everything.

Michelle Lomas: Yeah. It's that classic thing, isn't it? Yeah. We've had a lot of retailers on the show. The things that you say are very similar to what they say, but Covid just killed it for them.

Michelle Lomas: Yeah, in a good way. I say that in a good way, in a positive way, not a bad way. Um, In terms of you know, everybody just thought. This would be the end for so many other brands. Sadly, it was, I was working in a publisher house at the time, and that was a really devastating time. A lot of people let go, and yet you see the retailers who just, it was phenomenal for them, but mainly for the ones that were able to pivot.

Michelle Lomas: There were many that didn't pivot fast enough.

Sam Viney: Firstly, I agree, it, it was incredibly disruptive for retailers. I think what worked in our favor and the brands that did well were the ones who genuinely had their e-commerce ducks sorted out.

Michelle Lomas: Yes.

Sam Viney: Before it all hit. Versus a lot of other brands who were furiously trying to make up for 10 years of non-investment in anything digital and trying to do it all in the space of six months. And obviously that's an impossibility.

Michelle Lomas: But, so you joined Lounge Lovers right? In the midst of

Sam Viney: Yes. Yeah.

Michelle Lomas: The C word.

Sam Viney: Right. In the midst of all of that. Yes.

Michelle Lomas: Um, so why don't you maybe share with the listeners a little bit about the Lounge Lovers story.

Sam Viney: Sure.

Michelle Lomas: And how you came to be there.

Sam Viney: Yeah. Look, Lounge Lovers was started by the founder Derek Kerr about 11 years ago.

Sam Viney: And Derek was working in the UK and he was working private equity at the time, and he realised that. Australians were fairly hard done by, as far as the furniture market went. It was dominated by some legacy players who sold very vanilla sort of furniture not particularly stylish or anything like that.

Sam Viney: And if you wanted the cool stuff, it was available, but you had to pay an awful lot of money. He came back from the UK with a viewer starting a business to, to make stylish furniture accessible to everybody to the. The common person, if you will. And the business went through a few iterations started off as digital only which lasted for a while but then opened up a showroom and saw how well those sort of two things worked together.

Michelle Lomas: You kind of can't be a furniture store exclusively online. Right. For, for the mid price.

Sam Viney: Yeah. Look I, I. I'd share your view on that, except probably 10 years ago I would've said that

Michelle Lomas: Temple and Webster is a classic case where you can be, but yeah.

Sam Viney: Yeah. Temple and Webster, Mocka, and Zanui, we are always all doing fairly well.

Michelle Lomas: Yeah.

Sam Viney: But certainly I think for a lot of people they want to be able to see something in the flesh and

Michelle Lomas: Sit in the chair.

Sam Viney: Yeah, exactly.

Michelle Lomas: It's a couch is an ex- it's like a tv. You kind of like, same as JB Hi Fi. I kind of wanna see what the color looks like. I wanna go in store and have a look. I might still buy online. But I wanna sit in the chair and see how comfortable it is.

Sam Viney: That's it. The two look, the two things. There's no question that the digital experience and the bricks and mortar experience, they are incredibly interconnected. And that's an area that we have spent a lot of time, resources, and money understanding the interplay between those two things. That understanding's never perfect. But certainly I think we're in a fairly good space there. We started off with one showroom. For context, pre Covid, the numbers of team members were sitting around 30 or 40. We're up over 200 now.

Michelle Lomas: Excellent.

Sam Viney: We've got nine showrooms across Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. And look, our ambition is to have more, just so more people around the country can access us as a, as a brand.

Michelle Lomas: Mm-hmm. And so, you know, you joined uh, a couple of years ago, obviously off the back of an interesting time where lots of brands were pivoting. What was going on at the time?

Sam Viney: I was brought in to look after marketing and e-commerce. To be honest though I think the, the greatest benefit of having somebody who'd come from a big retailer Aldi and Amart and particularly Aldi, is understanding of processes. And how a large organisation works in a really efficient manner um, as you can you know, perhaps expect um, we were growing so quickly that we'd outgrown our processes, outgrown our systems um, and, and to a certain degree it started to pop at the seams a little bit.

Sam Viney: So it was really a playing catch up with getting these things in place so that we operated efficiently, internally. But more importantly our customers had a great experience. When your processes and systems aren't working effectively, it's very hard to give them the experience that you want to give them.

Sam Viney: Happy to say that it's worked. Our NPS is sitting up around 70 which in the furniture market is pretty unheard of.

Michelle Lomas: What's the average?

Sam Viney: Look, you see all sorts of things any, anything over sixties world class.

Michelle Lomas: Excellent.

Sam Viney: I'm not privy to other retailers, but I think during Covid in particular, you would've had plenty sitting at sub-zero just because customers get tired of delays and all that sort of disaster.

Sam Viney: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So a lot of my time when I first landed was just getting the machine working a bit better than what it had been. Making sure we had the right people and the right roles, the right skill sets available to make sure that sort of our growth could continue and not collapsing on itself, which, which often happens when you're making that sort of, journey from a founder run startup.

Michelle Lomas: Yeah.

Sam Viney: Into a more mature business. Now, I'm not suggesting we're a mature business, we're far from it. I talked about us previously being an awkward adolescent, um, you know, a teenager where, okay we're no longer this toddler running around, just crazy. But by no means are we at that maturity.

Sam Viney: We're still very much on that journey. And I'd say we've got another five years of that at least.

Michelle Lomas: Mm-hmm. And so what were some of the big things?

Sam Viney: Look it's not a sexy part of the organization. But warehousing and logistics in furniture is incredibly important to your customer experience.

Sam Viney: If you can't find the products that, and I just for context, the warehouses in furniture are huge things. They're massive. It's,

Michelle Lomas: I can imagine.

Sam Viney: You're talking football fields.

Michelle Lomas: Yeah.

Sam Viney: Or larger stacked up to the rafters. So if you don't know where various products are or if you don't know how many are there?

Sam Viney: If you grab the light grey instead of the dark grey and put it in a truck and deliver it to somebody's house they're also gonna have a crappy experience. So one of the first things that we tackled is making sure we put the right systems in place. So it's all automated picking not, the sexy part of the industry but our team basically is told where to go, what to grab, boom.

Sam Viney: You scan a barcode and basically you can't really-

Michelle Lomas: Get it wrong. Yeah.

Sam Viney: Yeah. So that was a big part of improving our customer experience. Joining up our communications from a customer service perspective was crucial as well. Just wasn't quite as perfect as it should have been.

Sam Viney: Once again, reflecting a business that grew really quickly.

Michelle Lomas: That's always the case of a startup a little too fast. And the systems aren't always you add on things.

Sam Viney: Correct, correct.

Michelle Lomas: Without connecting the dots between the things you already have and the thing that you're implementing.

Sam Viney: Correct.

Michelle Lomas: Yeah.

Sam Viney: We've got that running really well. The final piece was understanding how our marketing investment was working. We are aggressive in our marketing and we had a certain confidence level about what the various channels were returning. But as always, with any form of sort of attribution model or ROI modeling, you'll occasionally get this outlier result, which cause you all to stop and pause and go, hold on.

Sam Viney: Is this working as well as what we think it is? Or if we use a methodology that perhaps overstates this or understates it and so we spent a lot of time modeling it different ways. And what we've got is a pretty, pretty confident view on what our various channels are returning to us always using historical data, which historical data in the context of a very rapidly changing external environment you can't rely on the specific dollar number.

Michelle Lomas: So attribution modeling is generally a little eyeopening.

Sam Viney: It absolutely is. And I've done it at almost every organisation I've been part of. And it is, it's always something that surprises you. And in the context more of a startup brand like us, more of a niche brand, certainly some of our digital marketing performed better than what I'd be anticipating. That's not to say it's better than traditional. That's a blank, blanket statement I couldn't quite make, but certainly it, it opened my eyes.

Michelle Lomas: And so what were some of the things once you undertook that exercise that surprised you?

Sam Viney: I've got a history in big brands. Big brands, big budgets mass reach to an audience that's always in market. And quite frankly, when you're talking supermarkets, it's very hard to segment supermarkets too much.

Sam Viney: Mm. You know, everybody needs food. Um mm-hmm.

Sam Viney: And Aldi was a market that almost self-selected to a certain degree.

Michelle Lomas: Yeah.

Sam Viney: But I think what spun me out a little bit when I came into Lounge Lovers so we invest heavily in things like performance media and traditional textbook thinking, or at least my interpretation of it, it might be wrong. That's all about conversion performance, meters about conversion.

Sam Viney: Yeah. It's down the bottom of the funnel and you've already, you need an audience that's already aware of you and yada, yadada yada. And I came into it and with my old school hat on thinking that way. And what I actually realised is how much, now thanks to the the likes of Google and Facebook performance media actually spins that on its head.

Sam Viney: Is you can actually drive awareness and consideration through performance media.

Michelle Lomas: Correct.

Sam Viney: Yeah. Um, Which you know, to a lot of people I'm tipping, they're sitting there going, that's really obviously it-

Michelle Lomas: But if you haven't been in that world. Certainly if you've been sitting in a traditional media role for a very long time and I, I just dunno if we should be talking traditional media anymore.

Sam Viney: Yeah, true.

Michelle Lomas: Cause digital is, is is traditional media now, like there's a whole world of new media

Sam Viney: Correct.

Michelle Lomas: Coming in that's you know, the new, new media.

Sam Viney: Yeah.

Michelle Lomas: But um, if you've been in that world for a very long time, it's hard for you to understand. That performance can drive brand and brand can drive performance. Both can do equally the same thing.

Sam Viney: Correct. And, and that's, that's been really, really useful for us. One of the strengths of our business, we've got a really clear view of who our shopper is. And that has a lot of advantages. That's got advantages in terms of ranging decisions. Um, you know, what fits within our range and what doesn't fit within our range.

Sam Viney: Which in the furniture category, there is the tendency to want to be everything to everyone. If you go into a traditional furniture retailer, one of the larger ones that have been around for a while, you'll find everything from a couch for 200 bucks through to 10,000 plus dollars, which I think that's the very definition of trying to be everything to everyone.

Sam Viney: And once you reach a certain size, you need to serve a fairly broad range of segments. But for us in the size we're at means we can be quite targeted. And I'm sure if I went up and down Martin Place today asking people how much would you pay for a sofa? Probably hear, lots 2 or 3 thousand dollars and we're okay.

Sam Viney: That's normal.

Michelle Lomas: Yeah.

Sam Viney: Actually, when you ask a, across the breadth of Australia, and I've done this, the number's $1,200. So if we're out there paying for audiences that reach a whole heap of people who think $1,200 is the maximum that they pay for a sofa or what they see as being the fair value of a sofa with the way our range goes, yes, we've got some sofas for $1,200, but the average has sit at about two and a half. We got a whole heap of people who just, quite frankly, we'll never shop with us.

Michelle Lomas: It's also a bad brand experience I think if you are, if you're trying to target that consumer cuz you think you have one or two products that meet their needs.

Sam Viney: Exactly.

Michelle Lomas: But then they fall in love with another so far and then they're like, it's too expensive for me. And that's disappointing.

Sam Viney: Yeah.

Michelle Lomas: So you know, you always forget that too. If you are, if you marketing to somebody who isn't quite your customer set

Sam Viney: Yeah.

Michelle Lomas: They might actually have a bad experience.

Sam Viney: Correct.

Michelle Lomas: Cause they feel bad.

Sam Viney: Correct.

Michelle Lomas: That they can't buy the things they want.

Sam Viney: Correct. There, there's nothing worse than finding yourself. And I think we've all been there finding yourself in a retailer where you're walking around and you flip around the ticket.

Michelle Lomas: Oh, it's so embarrassing.

Sam Viney: And you see it in yeah. Those places where if you've gotta ask how much it costs, you probably can't afford it.

Michelle Lomas: The Flex Your Hustle Podcast is made possible by the team at Commission Factory

Michelle Lomas: Commission Factory is the largest performance and partner marketing network in Asia Pacific. Pairing tens of thousands of meaningful and scalable partnerships. If you are listening to this show, you might be looking for ways to find and activate successful connections that drive revenue for your business.

Michelle Lomas: Well, Commission Factory works with everyone from e-commerce brands to influencers, big digital editorial titles, and cashback communities right through to the latest apps and software that help customers convert and they aggregate all those partnerships in the one place. You'll love how easy that makes managing it. If you're tired of paying for clicks and impressions commission Factory is a pay on performance marketing platform where you pay only when tangible sales are generated, not just eyes on the page, so it's low risk and easy to manage your bottom line. So to all you digital publishers, influencers, online retailer, and marketing agency folks out there, come see what Commission Factory can do for you.

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Michelle Lomas: When we chatted the other week, you said something that I thought was really interesting around the customer journey and how the customer journey for buying a lounge or any sort of furniture is very different. You know, it's, it's still needs based. But it's not always brand driven.

Sam Viney: Correct.

Michelle Lomas: And so how do you tackle that when you know that you know, brand is important?

Sam Viney: Yep.

Michelle Lomas: The brand isn't the only thing or the essential thing in the customer journey.

Sam Viney: Yeah. So look, firstly in the furniture category, There's very few strong brands that I'd say that most people would recognise, but the furniture market is really fragmented.

Sam Viney: I don't, couldn't think of too many more markets are as fragmented as what furniture is, particularly for its given size. So as a reasonably unknown player, we've gotta give people the confidence to make a purchase from us. And a purchase that is a very meaningful amount of money. It's an amount of money that we'll never take for granted.

Sam Viney: And coming into the furniture category and a smaller player, the tangible parts of brand is far more important than brand as me as an advertising guy thought about it traditionally you go, okay, brand is a big expensive TV ad that you then pay lots of money and run everywhere. But the reality is in a category like furniture, a customer encounters you on Google Shopping, for instance.

Sam Viney: They've typed in, I wanna buy a mid-century leather brown sofa. So those results pop up and they see Lounge Lovers, never heard of us, but the product looks really good and the price is really attractive. They click on it. The experience that gives them the confidence is A, is the digital experience, is the website something that gives me, does it feel like a proper brand?

Sam Viney: Does it reflect quality? I think we've all had those experiences where you find a product that looks like it's gonna be really good value. You get to the website and it's is this a scam website? This feels a bit too rough and reading and a bit too good to be true. So making sure that the digital experience feels like your brand, premium, high quality, stylish, all the things that we pride ourselves on. And then knowing the interplay between our digital experience and bricks and mortar, knowing that quite frankly, most people, if they're spending two and a half thousand dollars on a sofa, they're going to head into one of our showrooms and check it out.

Sam Viney: That's where you're really gonna land perceptions of what your brand stands for and how does this represent good value and will the customer ultimately go through and purchase it. I'm really proud of our showrooms. I think we've got a really unique aesthetic. If you haven't been into any or

Michelle Lomas: I haven't.

Sam Viney: Okay.

Michelle Lomas: I'm gonna have to go for a visit.

Sam Viney: Look we specialise in taking the ugly duckling spaces, so often they're ex industrial spaces and warehouses and make them look cool.

Michelle Lomas: Yeah.

Sam Viney: So we do that. It works really well with our furniture range.

Michelle Lomas: Nice.

Sam Viney: You know, I always love you know, running focus groups in showrooms and sort of, you let people wander around for the first 15 minutes just looking at things.

Sam Viney: And even for those who have never heard from you they're like, ah, this is great. This all feels very much like me. It's this is all being chosen for me. So, so, you know, how appealing is your range in the flesh, you know, people touch it and feel it. And then finally the other really crucial element is what's the service like.

Sam Viney: We spend a lot of time refining our approach to service. We have a layer of expertise, so a lot of our team are ex interior designers, architects, and all that sort of thing, so they know what they're talking about. And you get two groups of people who come in. You get some who know exactly what they want.

Sam Viney: They've got a passion for it.

Michelle Lomas: They've research, they've been on Pinterest, they've

Sam Viney: Oh, they're all over Instagram.

Michelle Lomas: Yeah.

Sam Viney: Yeah. They know exactly. And they just make a beeline for the product. And here's my card.

Michelle Lomas: Yep.

Sam Viney: Take it. But then you get people who, and I've certainly fall into this category where you kind of know what you want to achieve.

Michelle Lomas: A browser.

Sam Viney: You don't know how to get there. Mm-hmm. So having somebody to sort of hold your hand and walk you through, that's really, really um, useful. We're not an intimidating place. We're really friendly. Furniture, particularly once you get into the more stylish stuff, has a bit of a tendency to be a, quite an intimidating experience if you're not confident in what you're doing.

Sam Viney: So we're really conscious of that.

Michelle Lomas: And that's so true, the fact that you picked that up and you went you know, this is actually a problem and customers don't like that, but yeah, it's so true. You walk into the more expensive places they can sniff you.

Sam Viney: Correct.

Michelle Lomas: And you just don't get treated nicely.

Sam Viney: It's like going into retailers in Paris.

Michelle Lomas: Yeah.

Sam Viney: You always feel like you're the least cool person in the entire city and everyone's judging you. So we do everything we can to make it a casual and friendly open experience.

Michelle Lomas: That's just such a nice um, thing that you've adopted that just really understands the audience.

Sam Viney: Yeah. We've got a really strong culture. Where everyone's very, very unique. But there are certain things that sort of hold us all together and one of it is just, yeah, just being really customer focused, but um.

Michelle Lomas: Down to earth.

Sam Viney: Not, yeah not intentionally over slick, if that makes sense.

Michelle Lomas: Yeah.

Sam Viney: Not pushy. We don't want to be one of those places and where you walk in and. If someone makes a beeline over to you and then latches onto you for the entire time you're in the showroom because they wanna get the sale and make the commission. We're very much not like that.

Michelle Lomas: That's really nice. I mean, I guess every lounge obviously there's varying types of furniture to buy at varying price points, but a lounge for instance, is something that you upgrade.

Michelle Lomas: Every time you buy, you spend a little bit more.

Sam Viney: Yep.

Michelle Lomas: And you get a bit of a better brand. And so if they're coming to you, they're upgrading a bit.

Sam Viney: Yes. Correct.

Michelle Lomas: And so it can be, to your point, quite intimidating.

Sam Viney: That's exactly it.

Michelle Lomas: And a little nerve wracking. I haven't spent this much on a couch before. It sounds like there's a lot of complexities to that customer buying journey.

Sam Viney: Yeah.

Michelle Lomas: I know you really have been working with Commission Factory and the team from the affiliate marketing space, traditionally seen as a very heavy performance driven conversion. How do you activate from an affiliate marketing space knowing that there are so many complexities around the journey?

Sam Viney: Yeah, it's so firstly quick shout out to Hannah, who's our performance media lead in the business. She was the one who bought the whole concept of affiliate marketing to the table.

Michelle Lomas: Yep.

Sam Viney: To myself and Derek, who was the CEO at the time. It was something we'd never really considered.

Sam Viney: Mm. Um, it was completely new to me. Sounded a bit scary at first. Particularly when you're talking sort of cash back offers and all those sorts of things. Once again, going back to the discussion between the tension between sort of short term sales driving activity and long-term brand activity.

Michelle Lomas: Mm-hmm.

Sam Viney: But you know, the, the data's there. Uh, it shows that when you're talking our target people are doing people. Look out for these promotions and opportunities. We really go down two paths. One, I'd call our always on approach which is very much about getting ourselves in amongst affiliate editorial content that quite frankly, people who are in the furniture market, I'm looking for a couch, I'm gonna research it online. I'm gonna find some editorial content that tells me more stuff. And also just people who have a passion for interior design who might not even be in the market for it. So that really serves two purposes for us. What one is it does drive brand awareness for us. It does that dual role, just performance media and Google Shopping does.

Michelle Lomas: That's something that people forget as well, that you are only paying for a conversion, but that editorial content is up there. I mean, you might be in a list of four different brands. You have exceptional lounge quality, but you're also driving awareness.

Sam Viney: That's exactly it. And that's being able to do that job. That one, there's two jobs with the $1.

Michelle Lomas: Well, actually the awareness is free.

Sam Viney: Yes. True. The, that's a good way of putting it. The awareness is a free.

Michelle Lomas: The awareness is absolutely free.

Sam Viney: Correct.

Michelle Lomas: And unlimited.

Sam Viney: Correct, yes.

Michelle Lomas: Um, It's the conversion that you only pay for.

Sam Viney: Yeah. And then look, and then obviously we have our sort of more promotionally driven stuff cash back offers which they work really well for us. And when we do it we apply a similar sort methodology to what we did. Do with other promotions if we've got a compelling offer, we make sure we push that really hard.

Sam Viney: We want to be prominent on the various websites. We wanna be prominent in the EDMs, and we want an offer that's actually gonna get people to take the leap and give us a go. And so we take it from there. So it's something that we dipped our toe into the water. We were late to the party, it's probably 14 months ago, 14, 15 months ago. And the general theory within our business is we're up for giving anything a go. Yep. From a marketing perspective we run trials galore. We make sure that we've got clear measurements around them. That's one of the key things.

Sam Viney: And then the final part of it is being prepared to admit when something works and something doesn't work. In the case of um, affiliate it works, it works. So we do more of it. And it still continues to return to our business.

Michelle Lomas: I mean, again you're only, you're only paying for what you get yeah.

Sam Viney: Derek, our founder is an accountant.

Michelle Lomas: Oh, he would love this thing.

Sam Viney: He, he loves, loves this conversation. He rolls his eyes when I say anything about brand. Yeah. But when we are talking about marketing channels where you only pay for when you make a sale, oh, that's music to an

Michelle Lomas: Excellent, excellent.

Sam Viney: Music to an accountant ears.

Michelle Lomas: And so how do you manage that within the business and with some of the other activity that you are activating? Is it all managed within the one team? Do you separate the affiliate marketing in its own little buckets?

Sam Viney: Um, everybody wears more than one hat. Um, you know, sometimes that's a hard position to justify when markets are shooting up.

Sam Viney: But when things are getting a bit harder, like at the moment it's good to be in a position in an organisation where we've taken that sort of leaner approach.

Michelle Lomas: Yep.

Sam Viney: So our affiliates program sits in with sort of our performance media team. I say team, there's two of them. I guess two people does make a team.

Michelle Lomas: It does.

Sam Viney: But that's where it sits. And along with CRM. So you've got all the data-driven activity sitting with the one group of people and they can keep an eye on it. All of it. As far as I'm concerned you know, the, the competency that makes a really good performance media person, makes a great affiliate person, makes a great CRM person.

Michelle Lomas: It's a mindset.

Sam Viney: It is very much a mindset. It is.

Michelle Lomas: It's not a channel, it's a mindset.

Sam Viney: It is all numbers. It is all numbers.

Michelle Lomas: Yeah. So you've gotta have that kind of real passion and desire. To see those numbers improve, to see those sales come in.

Sam Viney: Correct.

Michelle Lomas: And to optimise off the back of that.

Michelle Lomas: Yeah. You don't just turn it on and let it run that.

Sam Viney: That's it. Look and this is completely different to my mindset and that's why I appreciate the team so much is their level of detail that they go to and those ongoing little refinements.

Michelle Lomas: Yes.

Sam Viney: You know, I struggle to concentrate on anything for more than 10 minutes. Yet Hannah and James sit there and look.

Sam Viney: They don't leave any stone unturned when it comes to driving that program along.

Michelle Lomas: Yeah. Look, I mean the, there is a lack of talent in the industry from a performance perspective.

Sam Viney: Yep.

Michelle Lomas: So when you find good people who have that natural brain power and that obsessiveness.

Sam Viney: Yeah.

Michelle Lomas: Keep ' em.

Sam Viney: Yeah. Look I agree. Particularly I think it's one of the challenges with the more data driven areas is we're really fortunate that we've got two people who can understand the commercial side of the business, obviously translate that into our performance media. And then quite frankly, for me, the rarest part of that skillset and the one that both of them have is being able to communicate that back to the non-digital markets within the business.

Sam Viney: Because there's a risk that it ends up as this black box and yeah, they just do some stuff.

Michelle Lomas: But other people don't understand.

Sam Viney: It's undervalued.

Michelle Lomas: Yeah.

Sam Viney: Cause people don't understand and if they're not good at communicating it, it's no one will ever understand. It's just the guys sitting in the corner who just beaver away on, on that stuff. Whereas they've, they play a really big role in broader discussions within our company.

Michelle Lomas: One last question on this. I was just curious to understand, because you said from an affiliate perspective, you're doing a lot of testing and learning.

Sam Viney: Mm-hmm.

Michelle Lomas: And that's part, and it should be part of the iteration, right?

Sam Viney: Yep.

Michelle Lomas: Takes time. It's a bit like other channels like SEO where you kinda gotta build on it and grow and then-

Sam Viney: Yes.

Michelle Lomas: You know, you find out what works and what doesn't. So what's worked and what hasn't?

Sam Viney: Oh, really good question. I don't wanna say who they are cuz our competitors aren't on there as much as what we are.

Sam Viney: But finding the right environments and the right affiliates to work with has been really critical. Some just boom, others don't. We don't necessarily always understand why. But a lot of it just comes back to the audience. But if you're talking in the furniture market, some of those environments, we reaching people who would, might be a Fantastic Furniture shopper. Just a different price point. So making sure that we just keep experimenting with different individuals.

Michelle Lomas: And that's from a publisher perspective?

Sam Viney: Yeah.

Michelle Lomas: Yeah. Specifically? Yeah. Yeah.

Sam Viney: The other is just around we're talking the more transactional, more promotional stuff. Just, at what level we know it triggers a purchase. There's a certain amount of what's the magic percentage? If we offer a 2% cash back, is that gonna drive somebody to buy a two and a half thousand dollars sofa?

Michelle Lomas: Mm-hmm.

Sam Viney: I can tell you from experience, no. So often that we need to be a bit more aggressive with those offers. Now without getting too boring and retaily you've also gotta consider that in the context of the wider office within what is the product. What is the margin on that product? What is the promotional pricing on that product? And then over the top of that, what is the sort of the cashback that we're prepared to offer through our affiliate partners?

Michelle Lomas: How much am I willing to give up to make a sale?

Sam Viney: Correct. Furniture is not a huge margin game. Might sound on the surface like it is but it's not.

Michelle Lomas: And it sounds like you're pricing this in a way that's making it more accessible.

Sam Viney: Correct.

Michelle Lomas: Can have quality at an affordable price.

Michelle Lomas: And so that often means you are, you are cutting your margin to be able to deliver that.

Sam Viney: Correct.

Michelle Lomas: Whereas as we know, some are, yeah. Quality there's a little bit more of a price tag to that.

Sam Viney: Don't think I could have put that any better. Particularly in the environment at the moment, costs are going up, costs have been really high, the shipping cost situation.

Sam Viney: So it's a lot of businesses have taken a huge hit to the bottom line. So while it might sound like a discussion between two and 5%, which you, ah, it's only 3% what that's not that big a deal. Actually, once you work through the entire P & L 3% can be the difference between making money and being busy idiots.

Michelle Lomas: Yeah. Fair enough. I'm sure it's a good tactical tool though, when you've got those moments, warehouse clearances and the like to just shift product cuz you've got a whole new low coming in and, and-

Sam Viney: Yep, yeah. Absolutely. There's lots of space taken up in warehouses. Um, you know, how much space?

Sam Viney: 20 couches it takes up, it's a lot of space, so if you need to clear something out, it's really useful for doing things like that.

Michelle Lomas: Sam, well thank you. Thank you so much for joining us.

Sam Viney: Thank you.

Michelle Lomas: Really appreciate it.

Sam Viney: Perfect. Appreciate it.

Michelle Lomas: Huge thanks to Sam for taking the time to join me in the studio for his very first podcast. We have another exciting episode coming up. Here's a sneak peek.

Samuel Wood: One of the biggest things that we're seeing come out of the US especially is celebrities or influencers partnering with brands. Like the Jenners have just done with um, the teeth whitening or with the um, I think it's another makeup brand where they don't own the brand and all they're doing for is becoming a brand ambassador, creating their own store that the brand drop ships for them.

Samuel Wood: For us, how it would work would be, say Miranda Kerr created a vintage clothing store, and that would be powered by Azura Reborn. So Azura Reborn would list all the products on the store and uh, Miranda Kerr would go out there and talk about it and, and promote it to her followers. Fascinating. Um, And we would basically be the backend behind it and, and doing that.

Samuel Wood: And we're finding there's a lot of companies popping up that are doing that through affiliate marketing.

Michelle Lomas: If you aren't already, don't forget to follow so you don't miss an ep. And while you're there, why not drop us a rating and review? We'd love to hear what you think. Flex Your Hustle is made possible by the great team at Commission Factory and produced by Ampel.

Michelle Lomas: I'm Michelle Lomas. Keep hustling and bye for now.