Tim and Rebecca Bowring have quietly and quickly established a phenomenal retail business across six locations in South Australia, and now their website is giving them reason to expand interstate.

Everything’s going according to plan for the little furniture store that started out life 17 years ago at the Junction Shopping Centre in Balhannah. Well, it’s going to plan if – like Tim and Rebecca (Bec) Bowring – your plan is based around saying ‘yes’ to offers that are too good to refuse.

Since buying the business from Tim’s mother Mon, who started Balhannah by Design over a decade ago, Tim and Bec have quickly grown the homewares, furniture and fashion business into a successful multi-platform retail operation.

In fact, the pair launched the new iteration of the business, renamed Living By Design, before they had fully re-located their lives from London, where Tim was working as an investment banker and Bec as financial controller for retail phenomenon, Top Shop. Tim and Bec were almost commuting between Balhannah and London in the early stages.

“We came and opened the Balhannah store and we were here for two months,” says Bec. “We opened the Balhannah store in March, went back to the UK to sell our house and ship our stuff over. We arrived in September and opened the Tannunda store two weeks later.”

Tim and Bec Bowring stand outside their Kensington Road store – their biggest by turnover (and closest to us city folk).

Before they’d even re-located to run their new flagship store, they had signed a lease, devised plans, fitted out and filled up another store.

Then there was the pop-up shop in Victor Harbor the following summer. What was meant to be a temporary 12-week stint turned into another permanent location.

“The centre liked the way it looked,” says Bec – continuing, “we liked the way it traded.”

“That was a surprise for us, but again, it fitted in with our emergent strategy. Something came along, we considered it, we decided it was right for us and went for it,” says Bec.

CityMag figures that to get into the position where you can take opportunities as they present themselves, it must have been a long term plan, based on Bec’s experience at Top Shop and applied on the micro scale. But both Tim and Bec tell us it wasn’t; they started with two stores, a warehouse, and a completely manual system.

“It was literally Tim knowing what’s in the warehouse,” says Bec. “If someone wants to buy that sofa, Tim knows that we’ve got one on the floor at Balhannah and two at the warehouse. If a store sold a sofa they would call Tim. So we realised very quickly that we can’t scale that and we certainly can’t have a website, which we saw as a really big strategic growth area.”

Tim’s eyebrows are raised, eyes fixed on the coffee cup in front of him as Bec recounts the old days – just 24 months prior – when he was kind of like the central nervous system of he and his wife’s new venture.

And even though the company has instituted custom-built retail software to help manage inventory across their six locations there are new challenges as the business expands into online retail.

“I think some people get confused about a website,” says Tim.

“I was recently doing some buying in Melbourne and one of our suppliers said, ‘you know your website looks great – how’s it going?’ and I said, ‘it’s going really well,’ and they were like, ‘oh – it’s just like a free store isn’t it?’

“And I felt like saying, ‘well no – you don’t know anything about a website then.’ It takes a lot of time and money and resources to run a fully functioning website. Photographing your inventory for one thing, then editing the images to the right size for the screen, uploading them to the website, adding descriptions, thinking about those descriptions, making sure the website is coming up when people search,” Tim says.

When you run a web store, you’re not just running a website for your retail operation in Adelaide – you’re running a website on the world wide web. This puts certain pressures on a business to create a site that’s relevant and equivalent with the web stores of much larger retail operations.

“Where we had no digital staff we’ve now probably got the equivalent of two full time digital team members. It’s just like staffing a store,” says Tim.

And that store is opening up some interesting and exciting opportunities for Living By Design.

“In terms of our homewares and fashion – 80 per cent of the sales come from interstate. In furniture – 80 or 90 per cent of online purchases are coming from interstate,” says Tim. This success interstate hasn’t been achieved merely by launching a website – the company has invested heavily in all facets of their digital business.

“With my account’s hat on,” Bec says, “I’d say an online store needs to allocate what it would spend on rent on those other costs, whether that’s free delivery or your search engine optimisation, marketing, photography – just everything.”

And in creating a comprehensive digital presence for their customers Living By Design is now adjusting its growth strategy and considering a more centralised approach to servicing a national market.

“Previously we always thought we’d have to have a warehouse in Melbourne and another one in Sydney, but maybe with seven-day shipping we can have a great online presence, have one great store – central – and then still ship it out of our South Australian-based warehouse,” says Tim.

Taken in the context of the state of South Australia’s economy and the all too loud refrain from retailers who are doing it tough – Living By Design stands out in sharp relief from the doomsayers.

And while we’re sure Tim and Bec’s experience in finance and a global retail giant have given them relevant exposure and experience to run a successful business, there’s another element to their success we feel is more pertinent – a positive attitude.

Living By Design probably has many secrets to their success but one thing they’re not shy about is their willingness to work hard and say yes to the opportunities out there.