styles.  Inside Retail: Having worked with Lazada, Home24Germany and now Castlery, what drew you to the home furnishing industry and what excites you the most about your role at Castlery? Leah Howatson: I’ve indeed worked across a lot of markets over my 13 years. For me, one of the biggest throughlines has been the home and living category. I love it. I think it’s a mixture of inspiration, style and trend, but also is such a personal purchase for people. What you bring into your home and the sofa that you’re going to have in your house for 10 years is a big decision to make. So I love being part of that at Castlery and at all of my previous roles. We’ve built a really cool brand that is looking to solve customer pain points. We’re obsessed with designing and making sure that products that look beautiful are also servicing the needs of our customers and that they’re going to last for a long time. We’re pretty unconventional in a very traditional market, which is furniture. None of us have come from the furniture industry. We’ve all come from a background of digital, engineering, tech and are bringing all this diverse expertise to the furniture industry, which is a really exciting environment to be in. IR: Having worked across such diverse markets, what are the biggest lessons you have brought into your role at Castlery, and how do you tailor marketing strategies to resonate with different customer segments globally? LH: We take quite a localised marketing approach to resonate with different markets and different customer segments because the concept of home really varies across the markets that we’re in. In Singapore, there’s less space. It’s a pretty small island with 5-6 million people, so we’re really focused on super-functional, space-efficient products for that dense living environment. In Australia, we focus on the outdoors. There’s not much of a winter, so we’re able to focus on that category, while that category is not such a focus for Singapore because of the space constraints. And then in the US, the style is quite unique and quite different. Generally, their houses are bigger, but then in some urban areas like New York, they do have space constraints as well. From a style perspective, they’re very into the farmhouse style, so we make sure that our content, our influencer partners, really speak to this style, so our customers in each market can imagine our pieces in their homes. We regularly do house visits with our customers. And this is one of the most fun parts of my job. I’m usually behind the scenes doing the marketing, but a few times a year, we go to the local markets, we contact customers who have purchased from Castlery, and we ask if we can be invited into their home. So then we really see – after they buy, after the product gets delivered, after they unpack – how they live with it. How do they style it? What do they like about the products? What do they wish was different? And we take all this information and use that to inform our future product development, which is a very fulfilling part of my job because I love seeing how they buy Castlery furniture and put it in their homes. IR: Scaling a furniture business internationally comes with significant logistical challenges. Are there any key innovations in supply chain strategies that are helping improve efficiency, cost management and sustainability? LH: It’s been a turbulent time for the supply chain. During Covid-19, it was really challenging and changing month to month. For furniture, we’re especially impacted because the products are so bulky, so being able to optimise costs can really make an impact on the business. Something that our team has worked on that’s really helped strategically is to build long-term deep relationships with all our supply chain partners, all the way from shipping to the last mile to the customer’s home. And through that, we’ve been able to predict costs in a better way, but also strategically align when we’re looking at new distribution centres, new store openings, to make informed decisions from the get-go on the cost there. Another key piece for us is forecasting. Furniture is sometimes tricky to forecast, especially new products, because style plays such a factor. So if you only look at price, material and what else is in the market, you might not understand the full demand potential of these products. We’ve got a really strong data team that’s looking at the forecasts for the products to build a solid foundation, and then our merchandising team is making the judgment calls on top of this to factor in trends in the market. We also take information from advertising partners like Google, Pinterest and Meta on what they’re seeing as trends in the market. We also use that information to factor into our forecasting. We try to use all the information and all the signals out there to make smarter decisions on what we’re stocking. I think they’re the key pieces. We’re also always working internationally on our supply chain , and we have teams in Singapore, China and our local markets that are working really collaboratively to make sure that the process is as smooth for the customer as possible. IR: What marketing strategies and trends do you think will be game-changers for brands? LH: It’s a really exciting time from a marketing perspective. There’s so much chat around AI, of course. Hate to say it, but it’s always the case that AI is changing a lot, both in customers’ expectations and in how we work, in the furniture space, and the trends that are happening there.  For AI, I think a really interesting piece is localising content. The challenge that we face in furniture is that it’s very expensive to produce high-quality content that’s localised for the different markets. A Singaporean home looks really different to an Australian home that looks really different to a Los Angeles home that looks really different to a New York home and a Florida home. We used to do our photography in a quite a neutral setting, so customers could imagine the products, but it doesn’t really speak to their understanding of what a home looks like. But with AI, we’re starting to test how to change the settings of our products and use that in ads in different markets and different cities – even to test the click-through rate to see how it impacts adding to cart and customers purchasing. And it’s quite early days, but we’ve seen quite good results. I really think that’s the direction that content is going. I think customers will also become more demanding to see your products in a setting that is your home or looks like your home before you make the purchase online. This will only aid digital shopping even more and building trust for customers to buy furniture online.  A trend we’re really focused on is flexible living. I think it started during Covid-19 when we were all locked down at home. Home wasn’t just a place where you slept anymore, it was also a place where you did your yoga, where you hosted your friends, where you worked. So people’s perspective of their home shifted. Now with Covid-19 over and everyone back out in the world, I think some of these perceptions around having a hardworking home have stayed.  We’re thinking about how you can design furniture that meets these expectations. We’re making more chairs that have hidden storage underneath, so you can put extra plates or glasses that you usually only bring out when you host a bigger group. Also, of course, we’re looking at extendable tables so you can keep it small and then have that extra space when you want to host. We’ve also launched a new product called the Hug, which is very cool. So it’s a coffee table with stools underneath the coffee table, like nestled in, which means on a day-to-day basis, you can use it as a coffee table. But when you have guests over, the Hug actually can provide four extra nesting stools that you can pull out and have as a space for guests. We launched that last year and we’ve seen really good success because customers love finding furniture that solves these problems.  Another piece that links with this is customisation. We don’t want to stock too many different variations of products because that results in really complex supply chains, but we’re looking at expanding our customisation options and increasing the ability to swap out covers on sofas, so you can mix and match. If you’re bored of this white sofa after a few years, you can shake it up and have a blue sofa or red sofa without needing to purchase a whole new sofa. I think that’s a really exciting piece that we’re looking at as well from product innovation.  And of course, sustainability. Furniture takes a lot of resources and we want to make sure that we’re producing high-quality products. We spend a lot of time looking at our damage rates and making sure that our products go through rigorous testing to make sure that they can last for as long as a customer wants them in their home. The other piece of sustainability is certification around our materials so customers know that they’re bringing products into their space that don’t have harmful chemicals and that are good for themselves and their family. I think this is only going to become more and more of a focus through the years. Further reading: Why Castlery’s Europe debut ‘feels personal’ and where the brand is headed next.