Crafting success

By Melanie Cooper

Monday 1st March 2004

If it had stuck to its original business, Rose and Heather would no doubt brew a fine cup of coffee and serve some of the best lamingtons in town. But when founders Tim Heather and Lucille Rose realised they were selling more of Tim's homecrafted wooden coffee tables from their Warkworth tearooms than the coffee served on them, they traded professions.

Now, more than 20 years later, Rose and Heather is still a family business, with Martin Bell and his wife Mary Jane, the daughter of Tim and Lucille, at the helm. And it's still sticking to the founders' philosophy that efficiency - in terms of cost or time - can't be achieved at the expense of quality. It's a platitude that gets bandied around often enough, but Rose and Heather's results back it up - its finely crafted furniture, made from ancient kauri mined from the swamps of Northland, generates annual sales of over $10 million, including over $3 million in export receipts in 2003. By 2006, export sales are expected to reach $6 million.

Back in the early 1990s, Rose and Heather made a key strategic decision: while other New Zealand furniture makers were attempting to cope with the threat of cheap imports by competing on price, it went up market.

"Around 1992 when the market was feeling the squeeze, manufacturers in Australia and New Zealand were going down market in an effort to keep market share. We upped the ante and went the other way, focusing on a high-end product," says Bell.

The gamble paid off. The Rose and Heather brand has become synonymous with elegance, quality and comfort, no doubt smoothing the way for the company's expansion into homeware, including bed linens and bedroom furnishings, which began in earnest back in 2000.

The model boats scattered around the company's showrooms offer a clue to Tim Heather's original design inspiration. An ex-naval officer, Heather borrowed from 16th century boat design. Bell is also a keen yachtsman, and says the curves on furniture like the Tumblehome range mimic the shape of the boat's hull - which also happens to fit nicely with the human form.

Now Heather has stepped back from the day to day running of the business, and the design role has fallen solely to Bell. While he says he's tended to be more interested in aesthetics than structure, a very formalised design process keeps him grounded. Before the furniture goes into production with the company's 47 Auckland-based cabinetmakers, the designs are outlined, sketched and tested using 3Dautocad development software.

"But all that means nothing until the prototype is ready," says Bell. "To find out if the design is successful we still revert to the old ways - we make it up and sit in it, and then we know."

Sounds pretty logical, as does the company's marketing strategy. Rose and Heather furniture carries a hefty price tag - a complete dining suite in the top of the line range can sell for $16,000. But Bell says the company has increasingly moved to simple, timeless designs to encourage buyers to see the pieces as long-term investments. It also offers different ranges for different stages of life. The Eden range, for example, is the "entry level" offering, targeted at the newly married couple, while the Tumblehome and the premiere Trenail range are the suites you aspire to. A new design being released this year, the Newport range, will slot in between the Eden and Tumblehome range.

Last year the company won an export award for growing exports from $620,000 in 2000 to more than $2 million in 2002. It is on track to meet export targets of $6 million by 2006.

Bell and his wife Mary Jane opted in 1998 to focus their export effort through a new subsidiary, Rose and Heather Offshore. At the same time it ended a five year retail presence through David Jones in Australia and established its own store in Woollahra, Sydney. This year they anticipate opening in Melbourne and the demand in London will see a retail presence in the next two to three years - last year the UK accounted for 7% of export sales, thanks to word of mouth endorsements and expatriates continuing to accumulate the furniture.

A US store was opened in Venice Beach, California in 1999, but the company decided to withdraw after the events of September 11, 2001, when new security rules forced the company to land its products in Los Angeles and ship them around the country from there. Bell proudly boasts "what goes in to the workshop as logs comes out as the product you see in the stores" - so the shipping arrangement didn't work for the company's furniture. "By the time the furniture arrived at its final destination it was in kitset form."

Anecdotes like the one about the couple who phoned from Hamburg to order their Rose and Heather set bear out Bell's claims that the export strategies are working. Interestingly, Bell doesn't see Rose and Heather as competing with other furniture stores for these precious consumer euros and dollars.

"The time for straight retail is gone. We are competing in the leisure-spend area - customers are tossing up between a Rose and Heather suite or a holiday in Fiji. So we're competing against travel agents and operating in the service industry."
Looks like those coffee shop origins might come in handy after all.

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