Outdoor Furniture Retailer Lays Out The Strategies Behind Its Epic YOY Growth

In today's episode, we catch up with Lazy Susan - a garden furniture brand based in Portsmouth, UK. Founded in 2007, the brand specializes in outdoor furniture.

During the podcast, the brand’s founder and Chief Executive Michael Scott reveals how the business has overcome the challenges of the pandemic and Brexit to achieve impressive growth over the last 12 months, resulting in Lazy Susan being ranked highly on Brightpearl’s Lightning 50.

Transcript

Transcript highlights:

• “In the beginning I would take the product to garden shows but I got quite disheartened standing in a rainy field and sometimes selling absolutely nothing so after a couple of years we pivoted online with a £1,000 e-commerce site. We started spending with Google and within the first six months we'd maybe spent £3,000 pounds on advertising and generated £60,000 in sales. The website has driven our growth ever since.”
  
  
• “We were initially limited by the amount of physical inventory we could keep. In the first five years, we had to turn advertising off in our peak season because of over demand, which was kind of great but also frustrating.” 
  
  
• “We now hold a very significant inventory – maybe 50% of our forecast sales for the next year. That gave us flexibility during the pandemic and meant we could offer a speedy service to 95% of people. We weren’t having to say order now and we’ll deliver in three months. Everyone was totally overloaded so delivery times took a little bit longer, but consumers were perfectly happy to accept that because of the one off nature of the pandemic situation.”
  
  
• “Because of Brexit, we had to stop shipping from the UK into Europe in February 2021. I had to find a solution which was ultimately incorporating a new company in Europe. That was a massive challenge, but the result is that in 2022 our European sales were 40 or 50% higher than they were in 2020 – we've had massive growth in Europe. Brexit has meant we've had to invest in Europe, which is kind of ironic.”
  
  
• “Our front end is the main technology that’s driven our growth. We re-platformed from Magento to a German platform called Shopware. Our web store is driving 90% of our sales. The other 10% comes from marketplaces including Amazon. So our orders come from our website and go into our ERP (Odoo) and then out to our warehouses.”
  
  
• “One of our major USPs at Lazy Susan is that we have a huge amount of user generated content – about 95% of all the images on our website are user generated customer photos. We donate 10% of our profits to charities and every time we receive a photograph we donate a minimum of about £20 to charity. Last year we donated somewhere around the region of £130,000 to a variety of different charities. We try to stimulate the user generated content because we end up with images that we simply couldn't replicate with a professional photographer.”
  
  
• “About 20% of our orders are from repeat customers and we’ll be really working hard on increasing that next year. We plan to slightly reduce our marketing spend and focus more on CRM. We’ll be using Klaviyo to find ways to retain customers, despite currently only having a very narrow product range.”

Top takeaways

• Lazy Susan ranked in 25th place on the Brightpearl Lightning 50 UK 
• That followed a 63% YOY revenue increase in 2020/21
• The tech that’s driven their growth includes: Shopware e-commerce platform, Odoo ERP and Klaviyo CRM 
• UGC (user generated content) has proven to be a huge USP of the brand, helping to drive growth
• The business has recovered from Brexit by investing in a new European distribution center.