Design Warehouse has been selling outdoor furniture to New Zealanders since 1989, and their showroom on Nugent Street in Grafton does most of the selling for them. It's 2,600 square metres where you can sit at a teak dining table, run a hand along the wicker and see how a modular sofa looks next to a three-metre cantilever umbrella before you commit to any of it.
None of that came through online. Outdoor furniture is a considered purchase, and a full dining setting can easily run past $10,000, so the people buying one want to picture it in their own space before they spend that kind of money. In Grafton, that picture builds itself as you walk the floor. Online, the home page was working as a catalogue (product tiles, a sale banner, a list of categories), which suits someone who already knows the exact table they want and gives very little to someone still deciding.
We rebuilt the home page around the showroom. The idea was to give a buyer in Christchurch or Queenstown, who may never set foot on Nugent Street, the same read on scale, quality and fit that an Auckland customer gets in the first five minutes inside the door.
The page now leads with footage of the showroom floor and moves through the range by material (teak, wicker, aluminium and concrete) with every piece shown in a full setting. Collections like Cabo, Logan and Amalfi appear the way they're laid out in Grafton, so the sofa, the coffee table and the umbrella read as one decision instead of three separate product pages. Delivery, stock and assembly details sit right beside the imagery. On a showroom floor, the second question anyone asks is when it can arrive.
These are early numbers, from the first nine days of October against the nine days before. Total sales are up 81%. Shoppers adding items to their cart are up 37% and completed checkouts are up 43%, so a larger share of people who start a purchase are now finishing it. Sales grew faster than the number of orders, which puts the average order roughly a quarter higher than it was in September.
