You have just moved into your new property. There are unpacked boxes all over the floor and wide open spaces just waiting to be filled, so the flat or house can be turned into a home. Go online to buy a table, chairs, new rug or bed and you face waiting weeks or even months for your purchases to arrive.
With my business partner Dan Beckles, we were determined to speed up this whole process when we launched our online store Furniturebox ten years ago. We were both aged 17 and had just left grammar school in Salisbury. Starting a new business seemed more exciting than going to university.
We have steadily improved those delivery times and, three years ago, when we moved into a our brand new, state-of-the-art 88,000 square metre warehouse and company HQ right next to the M4 at Indurent Park in Chippenham, we knew as a disrupter brand we had the chance to break new ground again.
What if we were to offer free next day delivery on most orders placed by 8pm the previous night throughout the UK? That means if you live in Dundee, for instance, 430 miles away from Furniturebox HQ and a drive of at least eight hours, we will still deliver on time. This is the latest time in the UK that you could order larger furniture online to arrive next-day.
How have we done it? With a lot of hard work, a great team and courier partners and some fantastic digital innovations that have helped to speed things up.
Our location – a stone’s throw from the M4 and in a central position connecting roads north, south, east and west – is crucial but more important was a determination from the whole team to make it work.
We have always strived to be different and challenge the norms within our industry. Customers get the option of this rapid delivery or a choice of delivery date, but crucially it means they get all possible options free of charge. 8pm is the latest cut-off point we can currently achieve, but who knows about the future?
Fast delivery is so important to a disrupter like ourselves as it’s a massive pain point for most customers. Not only does it mean that we can deliver items quicker, it also means we can support customers faster. Nothing is more annoying than waiting weeks for an item of furniture and then finding out one screw is missing and having to wait weeks again to receive this part.
Once we had moved into the new HQ, we came up with the concept for our innovative 5-floor pick tower, to massively increase efficiency. Head of Warehouse Operations Rob Dean was involved in each step. Other key team members have included warehouse staff Jay Smith and Rhys Jones, plus Sarah Cope, Dispatch and Operations Manager, and her key lieutenants, Ellie Clay and Klara Jenkins.
We work with a number of excellent couriers, so ensuring we had one that was on board to handle the additional late pick up was crucial. We would like to give particular mention to DX who handle the collection and delivery of all our orders placed after 1pm and before 8pm.
Since we launched the next day guarantee in September 2023, 97% of orders have been delivered on time. That is way ahead of our competitors. Most can’t even offer next day delivery as a free of charge service, so we feel very proud to be excelling in this area.
We’re not quite as efficient as Amazon Prime yet. However, we’re faster on large parcels. A lot of the ecommerce giants aren’t set up to move larger, bulky items in a quick way and this is where we are really good. Larger parcels are more complicated to move and therefore we feel we’ve done a lot of the hard, foundational work. You can be certain that at Furniturebox, unlike many ecommerce giants, if you want to pick up the phone and talk to someone, there will be a friendly voice at the end of the phone ready to help.
All this hard work has been rewarded with a phenomenal Trustpilot rating of 4.9 and more than 8,000 positive reviews, 95% of which are top marks. It is why the Sunday Times ranked us as one of the fastest growing retailers in the country and we have a growing turnover of £26 million and a staff of more than 80.
We are always looking to innovate further. We’re looking at improvements in furniture assembly as well as trying to make all of our packaging fully home recyclable and having an option for the customer’s old furniture to be taken away and recycled.
Don’t take my word for all of this. Listen to our customers who tell us how happy they are every day on TrustPilot.
“Delivery was next day and free which was a great plus for them as you don’t find this with a lot of companies. They also kept us informed of delivery and the driver that delivered the shipment was both courteous, cheerful and polite.”
“Ordered midday and delivered the next day really good quality and happy with the garden set we ordered.”
That positive feedback means the world to us all and will drive us on to disrupt and innovate further in the future.
In Collaboration with Monty George, Managing Director and Co-Founder of online retailer Furniturebox
