Hi, I’m Alison Jones; I’m the owner of the Lark store.
And I’m Paul Matthews, the co-owner of the Lark store.
Paul and I were living in the U.K, we decided that we wanted the kids to have an Australian
childhood and we wanted to move to Daylesford, which is a small country town close to where
Paul grew up.
It’s a town of four thousand people, so we knew that the possibility of finding corporate
jobs, similar to what we were doing in the U.K though, was not really a possibility.
So we said, hey, let’s start our own business, what do we like doing?
Let’s see if we can combine our skills and do something that will help us to live wherever
we want to, grow, raise a small family, but do something that we really love.
We decided to combine our passion for great design, great visual concepts with our skills
in sales and marketing.
So we took some ideas from the stores that we loved over in Europe and added to that
a kind of country Australian feel to create a store that is really unique in Australia.
To see something that, you know, we literally started packing parcels on a bed and then
moved into the shed and the garage and then into the garage as a whole and then into a
larger space, then a larger space again, it’s pretty exciting.
My name’s Ashley Walker and I’m the General Manager of Lark Australia.
We’re an online business that has design-led gifts and homewares for basically everyone
that you might need to buy a gift for.
We’ve got our online store and our physical store.
Our online store is very much the primary stream of income, I guess, and a lot of the
time we’ve discovered that people really like to touch and feel the products that they’re
buying, which is the great thing about our physical store is that people can go in and
actually see the products.
But our online store we can have such a massive range that might not physically fit in our
store.
We can have a much wider variety of products.
So we have all of those products that basically come in, we load them onto the website and
get all of the images and everything as good as possible, as clear as possible and make
sure that the colours are all right.
So people get an accurate reflection of what the products are.
They can then select which products they like, add them to their cart, we’ve just created
a new gift wrap feature online as well, so they can actually select what style of gift
wrap they might like if they’re ordering it for a gift.
They can enter the recipient’s details of where we need to post it.
They can leave a gift comment in the field that we’ve got online so that they can tell
us what they’d like written on the card.
They can then select which products in their order they might like gift wrapped if they,
you know, only want one item out of their order gift wrapped and then the others they’re
going to keep for themselves or something like that.
And that all generates an automatic order which comes through to us, we can then print
it off and our dispatch team puts it all together.
All of that side of things out in the warehouse is all integrated, everything that goes through
the website, dispatch can see straight away, so that gives us the capability of being able
to send out a couple of hundred orders a day during the peak gift seasons.
Our processing of orders is all online as well, so as soon as something gets sent, our
customers get an email straight away to say that it’s been dispatched.
They get a tracking number with Australia Post so they can track it right up until their
door.
The dispatch process is always, you know, a challenge and something that we’re constantly
trying to improve upon.
In most cases our retail orders are dispatched and sent within 24-hours of us receiving them,
or at least within two business days.
If it’s a peak period, we basically will get the order in, it will leave by the following
day.
While we do our best to make sure that every order leaves as fast as possible really, you
know, if someone’s on the other side of the country in W.A, we’re in Ballarat, Victoria,
you know, they might think that they might be able to get something overnight, but in
most cases it’s not the case and so that’s always a challenge to make sure that people
understand that we will ship it as soon as we can, but then it’s up to another company
and what they think is acceptable to then determine how long it actually is before they
can get their products.
We do offer priority shipping and that means that our customers, if they place the order
before 1pm, we will ship the order exactly the same day.
By taking it online we’ve been able to reach thousands of more customers that really get
what we do and understand that we’ve got a particular focus and particular interest
in design and having a physical store we were not going to be able to reach that amount
of people.