Expanding With Optus: Down to the Woods

In 2009 Amber Clohesy launched a unique business concept from her family home in Melbourne: edgy homewares for children. Fueled with a passion for interior styling, retail and quirky products, Amber and her husband Ben set out to establish their family business ‘Down to the Woods.’ The wholesale business sells products to home and lifestyle retail stores that both enchant children and recapture childhood memories for adults. With products ranging from fairytale-themed Heico German lamps to vintage fabric quilts, through its retail clients ‘Down to the Woods’ has tapped into the whimsical desires of consumers across Australia – all from within a mini warehouse in their family home.

Twelve months since its inception, the business has grown rapidly and is now selling to over fifty retailers nationwide. With plans to launch an online retail store and expand on its services, Amber is looking to move to a dedicated warehouse and hire additional employees to manage the increased distribution demands.

Tailored to your Small Business Needs

Amber launched the company with the specific aim of being able to pursue her work interests while simultaneously managing her home demands and 20 month old daughter. Her decision to select Optus as a phone and broadband internet provider was largely due to the cost effective way it enabled her to fulfill these desires. On their ‘Yes’ Business Cap plan, Amber and Ben use two Optus Mobiles, one fixed landline, Broadband Internet and one Pay-as-you-go Mobile.

“The Optus pay-as-you-go mobile acts as the main inbound customer call line and makes it easy to identify work-related calls so I can manage family life accordingly. We make business calls from the landline, keeping the cost of the mobile low,” Amber said. “Ben and I also work from separate locations during the day, and the volume of business related calls we were making to each other became very high. With Optus offering free calls between mobiles on the same plan we were able to substantially reduce our business communication costs.”

Given Amber connects with customers via email, mobile, landline, the company website and blog, she needed a plan that would enable her to manage the varied services.

“Bundling is an invaluable feature of our Optus plan. It makes it easier to manage bills and significantly reduces our administration time, which has helped us increase our business productivity,” Amber said.

‘Down to the Woods’ regularly launches new products at various life and style trade fairs, often resulting in surged business growth. However with the flexibility of their existing Optus account Amber is confident the evolving communication needs of the growing business will be easy to manage.

Small business, Big reach

While her husband manages the administrative side of the business, Amber oversees the creative aspects, products, and customer relations. From early on she realised the power of social media as a tool to reach a broader audience, and set up a blog, twitter feed and Facebook page.

“The blog is an essential part of the business for building relationships with customers as it allows me to convey my persona and describe products with detailed descriptions and images. Most importantly, people leave comments so it’s a valuable means of obtaining customer feedback and assessing product popularity and satisfaction,” Amber said.

Facebook provides the business with a different function, as an outlet Amber uses to announce new products, attract online referrals, notify members when the blog has been updated and drive traffic to the website. Amber believes it also attracts new business through friends of existing fans.

“Recommendations from peers and friends are often the most powerful way of promoting ourselves. If we provide great products and a fabulous service our customers recommend us. Facebook is the easiest way of doing this as most people use this community.”

Amber says she loves the ‘low cost, low maintenance’ aspect of social media, spending around two hours per week managing the Facebook account and her blog, the majority of which time is spent updating the blog with creative posts.

“It’s an affordable way to generate brand awareness and once set up isn’t too time intensive. It means I have more time to spend with my family while still keeping in regular communication with my clients,” Amber said.

Find out how Optus can help you build your business with a great range of solutions designed for business builtforbusiness.com.au .

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