The Thursday Show: Why Visual Comfort bought Pooky. Plus: Charles Cohen settles his debt and keeps his design centers

20:57But they're here to stay was very much his message.

21:00Fred Nicolaus:Yeah. I mean, maybe we should kind of walk it back and explain what we're talking about here with owner's reps. I mean, you know, it's funny because the commercial world has always had owner's reps. If you're building a hospital or a library on a university campus, usually there's someone who represents the owners who's overseeing the construction process and keeping an eye on a budget, making sure all the I's get dotted and the T's get crossed. But it's actually been a very mixed bag in the residential world. I was talking to a lot of designers who have been in the game for a minute, and there's a lot of memories of maybe 20, 30 years ago.

21:30Fred Nicolaus:like the owner would just have like a guy, you know, it might be their lawyer or more likely it was their friend from college whose job it was just to sort of oversee, okay, keep track of all my properties and make sure the boat, you know, has gas in it. And, and that person would be charged with overseeing a design project. And there was a lot of, I don't kind of bad feelings around that version of an owner's rep, because often the person had no training in the design industry. They saw their only job is saving money. So they would just be really aggressive around I'm cutting the budget to the detriment of the project.

22:02Fred Nicolaus:And it was, you know, it was an arrangement that a lot of designers, architects, and contractors didn't like. And I feel like what has happened over the past 15 years is that, you know, the spirit of professionalism has come into owners reps. A lot of people from the contract world have come over to the residential side. There's a lot more, you know, reps who have a lot of experience in construction management and contracting. And it's just become much, much more common in the process. So, you know, there are still kind of like the friend of a friend reps out there in the world, and they are often not liked.

22:32Fred Nicolaus:But the more professional rep, I think, has a better reputation, although it's still complicated, as you mentioned. I agree, although I think many designers will tell you that a really good owner's rep is someone who can get things done quickly, who really has the power and authority to speak for the owner and can say yes and move the process along in a way that is often welcome. I mean, one of the reasons that all of this, I think, has grown into such a big, we're talking about the rise of the owner's reps, is so many more people have so many more homes. Part of the reason that this is an issue is, oh, yes, I have five homes to manage.

23:12Can you please help me with that? And that is something that we just weren't seeing 20 years ago, to your point.

23:18Fred Nicolaus:Yeah, I found this crazy stat in researching this article. It was something like in 2024, the United States economy minted 1 ,000 millionaires every day. It was like 1 ,000 new millionaires every day. It was totally crazy. I mean, the amount of wealth disparity that's grown in the country over the past 10 years has created a lot more people with a lot more money. And they're spending it on homes. And the projects are getting much more complicated. I spoke to a lot of people who were saying that 20, 30 years ago, a complicated residential project was still fundamentally a house. now it's like you've got a spa and a hammam and a gym and you've got five of them and you get a hell of a pad on the roof you know they have the complexity of like a museum in some cases and so that requires a lot more oversight and if the owner has like five of them that creates even more oversight i think that's where a lot of times where reps kind of come in and shine is keeping everything organized keeping everything running you know finding the the sort of gray spaces in between the architects designer contractor and making sure you know everything gets done.

24:15Fred Nicolaus:That's what sort of caused this boom. But, you know, as you mentioned, like it's an interesting dynamic because I think a lot of designers initially see it as, well, does the owner not trust me? Or who's this person who now has authority over the budget? And what does this person really know about design? So even though I think the new generation of reps is really professional and well-intentioned, it's just a dynamic that is just going to be fraught because of how the mosaic of a job site comes together. So it's going to be an area of the industry that takes some time to kind of get normalized, I think.

24:48I agree. And I think this whole notion of the power dynamic, and it's been interesting over the years. We've had so many people on the show, particularly when you talk to architects, they say, oh, the designer tended to really have the ear of the owner much more than anyone else on the project. And now there's this other layer that's being inserted. And many designers will tell you that it's a little bit more challenging because they don't have the ear of the owner in the way that they did. And you have to convince this other party and warm up to this other party and perhaps have dinner with this other rep who you need to get things done.

25:28So it does add a layer of complexity. And I was trying to think in having this whole conversation, the advice that we could sort of share with designers about how to navigate all of this. because here's yet another thing that they have to figure out.

25:41Fred Nicolaus:Another cook in the kitchen. Yeah. I mean, I would be loathe to give designers advice about this, not being a rep and not being a designer myself. I mean, I will say, though, that for all the complexity of it, as you were saying earlier, there are designers who now request specifically reps to be involved, especially with a very complicated project where maybe the owner's traveling all the time and there's 16 different subs that need to come together. And maybe the owner's rep can take on the difficulty of having a hard conversation with the owner about why a thing costs as much as it does. So there's, you know, it's really hard.

26:12Fred Nicolaus:And having a lot of these conversations, it was, most of it boiled down to essentially like, designers like working with a good rep and don't like working with a bad rep. As much as there's advice here, it's accept that this is going to be more and more of a reality on projects because everyone I spoke to said it's more and more common. I think it's just something to get used to rather than something to navigate around. Exactly. I very much feel the same way. And that's the message that I've heard from so many of the people that I've spoken to about this. It is the new reality. And if anything, more people are hiring owner's reps because they see the value in it.

26:45And so it is not going away. I'm sure we'll be talking about it more. And perhaps we'll talk to some owner's reps in the future and get their take on the whole issue. I like it. All right, that's it for the news. But there's plenty more to check out on businessofhome.com, including the latest showroom openings and a look at whether Bay Area designers are benefiting from the AI boom. We'll be back in a minute, but first, a quick break.

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28:40And we're back. I'm joined now by two returning guests. First up is Andy Singer, the founder and CEO of Visual Comfort, and Rowan Blacker, the founder of Pookie. Delighted to have you both on the show. We've got some big news to break. Pookie's got a new home. Andy, tell us about it. Well, we couldn't be more excited about having the Pookie operation join the Visual Comfort family and having Rowan and his team. Rowan's done an amazing job in building something that's quite special that we felt was extremely complimentary to the business that we've built here in the United States and trying to expand abroad with Visual Comfort.

29:25It is a special business. And Rowan, let's remind people about Pookie and a little bit of how it got started and what you built and why you became so popular. In a small way. Hi, Dennis. Yeah, well, look, Pookie was founded about 10 years, no, 12 years ago. And we sold our first flight in 2014. and it come out of me mulling over a sort of lighting concept and a lighting brand and combining the tech of the web and enabling me to sell lights in a slightly different way. For me, a lighting store had always been a bit constrictive in so much as you could only really offer one or two shades on each lamp base.

30:15With the web, we could use our imagination let it go completely wild and we could put as many shades as we liked on every base. So actually you suddenly gave the most enormous amount of flexibility and design ability to the customer through being able to do that. And we started out as a tiny, small little boutique operation. We had a small range of table lamps and a small range of shades, which we put together, and a few floor lamps. And then gradually we added wall sconces, wall lights and pendant lights and chandeliers. And then we discovered that you could sell lights for people who wanted them outside as well.

30:57And then we had a whole, and then the new revolution of rechargeable lights. And so we've had every opportunity to sell people all sorts of other things. The only one thing that we do do, which is sometimes debatable, and I argue very strongly that mirrors are lighting. And so we have a range of mirrors. You can probably tell from my accent, and Dennis, we know each other anyway. But one thing I didn't mention is we are a British company. We launched in the States only two years ago. So we had almost since day one, we had quite a lot of interest coming from stateside. And we didn't quite know how to deal with it.

31:33And then one day we said, oh, come on. We've just got to do it. Let's give it a go. There's clearly enough people over there who are interested in what we're doing. So long as we do it right. So we set up and we went for it. And that was about two and a half years ago that we actually sold our first. Yeah, it was February 2024. So we're a British company with much ambition in the States. What made now or what made the last few months, however long conversations have been going on, seem like the right time for you to have visual comfort, step in and be a partner? Why did you need this partnership?

32:15We had been thinking about finding a new, let's call it a new partner, for a while. And it's genuinely quite a complex business. And there are those people who are fantastic at running businesses right from inception through to a much larger operation. And there are those people who realize that there is genuinely a time to move on and hand it, hand your baby to people who are better qualified and better suited to taking the business to the next stage. I totally, totally, I mean, I've run a number of businesses over the course of my life, but I've never had a business like Pookie. And I see Pookie as a business which can go genuinely a long way.

33:00But equally, I don't actually believe that I'm the person to do that. You know, I want to be involved tangentially and I will always love the business. But Finishing Comfort was always the company that I wanted to hook up with, to be honest. And the fact that we've been able to do that because because they had such strong credentials, they had such deep roots in America and such a range of skills and a range of products that I just had the utmost respect for. So, you know, it's worked out. It's worked out very well. And I'm and I am super excited about the future. Well, understandably so. And Andy, let's come over to you and tell me when Pookie first showed up on your radar, Andy, and what you thought about it at the time.

33:45Yeah. Well, in the world today, especially when you have private equity partners, which we do, you are presented with all kinds of things from the investment banking community, from the perspective of things that are in your industry and things that are tangentially potentially could be interesting in your industry with acquisition opportunities and business opportunities. And we're not typically thinking about growing through acquisition because most of our growth has not been through acquisition. So Pookie was quite different. Pookie was basically an online company, primarily a direct-to-consumer company.

34:37and actually, and the product line was very, very, I would say very different than the core things. You know, visual comfort was basically brass, you know, lamps, right? And then it became Sandy Chapman, who was our lead designer, who did an amazing job in bringing us an audience of very traditional premium product designs. Then we became a magnet for other designers that wanted to have their things executed in a beautiful way. Those brass lamps became all kinds of different things with Barbara Berry and Suzanne Kassler and Thomas O 'Brien. We didn't have tons of color. We never really had tons of color and we never had tons of variety in color.

35:27Pookie has had an amazing run of just creating really fun things and selling it in a way that I think is very compelling in terms of a complementary way to sell to visual comfort. What we loved about the combination was we could learn a lot about how to reach the consumer audience online. We had a distribution channel through our own direct stores of exposing the product line in a physical form as well as exposing it to the interior design community, which is our strength. So we've got that capability. And I think that that is where Rowan found another synergistic opportunity in that we have a lot of the things that they're going to need over time.

36:27And so it was just a big kind of love fest between all of us finding things that we liked about each other that we wish we had that we didn't necessarily have that we're going to take time to build. Well, and Rowan, when you were thinking long-term about the business and coming to America in a big way, what had you imagined? And to the point of knowing that you would need a partner to help you to achieve all of that, where were you hoping to get Pookie in the coming years? I mean, at the start, I didn't have any particular ambition for Pookie. I just enjoyed selling lights and I enjoyed designing lights.

37:07And the only thing I wanted Pookie really to do was to stop losing money in the early days. And so I had a particular number in my head where I assumed the business would start breaking even. And I never, again, I never particularly thought about how big the market was in the UK. We often wondered whether we should go to Europe in order to push the business. We often wondered. Europe is a relatively tough nut to crack, obviously, because, you know, potentially we would have had to have a whole load of different websites or multi-language websites with different currencies. And we do still export a lot of sales to Europe, and it's relatively complicated.

37:50But America just seemed to be an obvious opportunity for us. We were selling, I think at the time we were selling not far from about half a million pounds worth of lights to America per annum. And so when we saw best part of half a million pounds worth of lights going over to the States every year at a price which was much higher because of the fulfillment of the shipping, our plan was to aim at the Northeastern States and focus as much of our marketing there. But we discovered very quickly that the realities was that people from all over the States wanted to buy from us. And we were put under the right noses, We had the right team.

38:32We got the right agencies involved. We thought that it might be appropriate to supersize a few of our lights. Lights in the UK tend to be a little bit smaller. So we supersized a few. And the interesting learning that we got out of that was that the lights that we did supersize didn't really work at all. So we got that wrong. But again, launching in any market is a long, long learning process, particularly a market like the States, which is a whole load of countries under one collective roof. And we are obviously not natives. And this brings you around to why it was so important for us, or it was the right strategy to look for a collaborator, a partner, to enable us to move to the next level.

39:20I mean, the truth is Pukki's done really well in America over the course of the first two and a half years, far better than any of the miserable old buggers who, and the naysayers in the UK who told us that America is the great graveyard for British businesses, which we know it to be. But for some reason, I just thought, as I said, we had so much interest coming in for the States. I'm just convinced that if we did it right, we could make a success of it. Genuinely, it's an exciting opportunity for us to work with a larger, more experienced company who can help us show the way in the market that they know so much about.

40:00I mean, equally, hopefully we'll be able to teach them a little bit about the UK market and perhaps about the European market as well. I mean, as Andy said, there was genuinely synergies all over the place. No, I was going to keep a count on how many times we said synergies throughout the conversation. We'll see. But Andy, I'm curious. So to Rowan's point, Are there technological innovations? Are there manufacturing innovations that you can immediately bring to Pookie that you can imagine making the product even better, more efficient? Is that part of it for you? I would say that we are voracious product developers.

40:40We've got a pretty sophisticated product development lifecycle process that we go through that helps us make sure that we can make fact-based decisions about what the market probably wants. And when the market tells us, hey, you were wrong, we've got a pretty good fact-based decision process that helps us edit and move things out quickly so that we keep on doing more right than not. So all of those things, I think, are going to be helpful. And we will collaborate on all of those things. And Rowan, while he has partnered with us and he's sort of taken a smaller position in the company, we said when we were doing this, you've got to stick around.

41:26You've got to be part of this because you've built something incredible. You're a talented guy. And we don't want any of that to, we don't want to, we don't want to lose any of that. So I get you're wanting to keep Rowan around. And this is part of what I wanted to ask about. So Rowan is fun, right? Rowan's fun to have around. And clearly he knows how to inject fun and energy into brands. I think part of what has been so special about Pookie is it's been fun. It's been colorful. and it made people think, even though rechargeable or cordless lighting was already out there, they made it look as if they burst onto the scene as if they somehow owned that category, that they were introducing this to you for the first time in this fun and playful way.

42:14Rowan, how'd you do it? To be honest, I never really sat down and thought very carefully about how we were going to set the Pookie brand up. That said, I have always worked with one... graphic design sort of branding agency in the UK called Big Fish. And I've been involved in many businesses and I've always worked with Big Fish. But not to say formula, the direction we go is always just to be as real, as honest, and I know this is an overused word, authentic. I'm sorry, that's a$5 fine, as we can. I'm fully aware, especially when I was originally selling sofas through sofa.com. We encouraged people to come to a website.

43:01We didn't even have a showroom. And we wanted them to spend between one and two thousand pounds on a sofa they'd never sat on before. And you had to win the trust of these people as best you possibly could. Now, it's not about being a sort of comedian. It's not about slapstick. It's not about crazy, intense humor. Of course, it's about a certain amount of humor, but it's about being human. And it's about winning the trust and the belief in the clientele who come and see you online for the first time. And this is exactly what we do with Pookie. We're asking people to spend, I'm talking pounds now, two, three, four, five hundred pounds on a company they've never heard of before.

43:45At least when we started, they certainly hadn't heard about it. So they come to our website. How do they know we're not a bunch of conmen? Well, it's our job to prove that we're not and that we're fun and that we're real people and we are real people who give a damn and who are actually going to do everything we can to make sure that the light that they get at the service they get and the value that they get is going to be top of the range. Well, I guess my question to you in that, Andy, twofold. So one, what can you imagine doing through your whole company? So you sort of made this reference earlier.

44:21Here you were this brass lighting company. What can you imagine this kind of fun, this kind of energy, this new brand coming into your entire operation and perhaps bringing some new energy, some new level of fun? And also, again, I made reference to this rechargeable cordless thing. You know, does this become this huge category? Is this something we're going to be talking about in such a big way in a few years? Does this enable you to make this an even bigger category with all of this? I mean, how are you thinking about it? Well, it is got all the ingredients of becoming a huge category. And it's certainly one of the largest growth categories that we're experiencing right now.

45:04And when you think about lighting today and all of the structures that lighting has to go in, there's lighting opportunities and applications in so many places where there just is no outlet. And even if you could get to an outlet, it's not that pretty or it's not that convenient or it's really expensive to do all that work. So the hundreds of millions of people that are living in places where there is no outlet, you can now put a light anywhere. And it's not just lamps. We're doing portable lighting on the wall. We're doing portable lighting on the ceiling. We're doing portable lighting on the floor.

45:45So the category is huge for sure. As we talked about in the United States, we've got a tremendous amount of magnificent, beautiful stores that we will expose Pookie in. And there are lots of other categories that we can bring to the world of the online world and the direct-to-consumer world that Pookie will have their touch on. And we love the name Visual Comfort. And you know that over the past three years, we've done a lot of work to change legacy companies' names into brand names that we've rolled into visual comfort. But we were never, ever going to even contemplate doing anything other than keeping Pookie Pookie with Pookie because it's so cool.

46:39It's so great. And that's what's going to happen. We're just going to continue to do everything that we can to add and accelerate the Pookie sort of philosophy and the Pookie business and the Pookie DNA because it is special, it's unique, and it just feels so right. Well, I'm excited about this deal. I'm a big Pookie fan. I have quite a few of the lights in my home, and I hope to have more in the future. So I'm excited about this deal. I'm happy that Pookie has a new home. I couldn't imagine a better partner than Visual Comfort. So it sounds like a win-win for both of you. And I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me about it.

47:27Take care. Good seeing you today. And we'll talk soon. Thank you, Dennis.

47:36And we're back. We're getting to the end of the show here, but before we go, we'd like to take a second to highlight anything going on in the industry that might have caught our eye. Fred, what caught your eye? Maybe you've heard that furniture stores are struggling, Dennis.

47:46Fred Nicolaus:I don't know if we've ever talked about that on a Thursday show. Yes. Well, you know, there is this ongoing story that, you know, local regional furniture stores are dying, but not the case with City Furniture, which is a Florida chain that, you know, maybe at one time would have been considered a small little regional operation. But it's a really big player in Florida. You know, it's not as well known outside that state, but it is quite the operation in Florida. And they recently announced a big change, which is that they're going from city furniture to city home and expanding into appliances and even some services, kind of broadening the scope of what they do.

48:18Fred Nicolaus:And it kind of reminded me of the Bed, Bath & Beyond conversation in a time when, you know, just being a store that sells pillows or sofas in this case is difficult. They're broadening the scope of what they do. And I think they're one of the few regional change that has the size and muscle to pull it off. So I'm really interested to see what city home looks like in the future. What caught your eye? So much evolving in the home space. Absolutely. Yes, yes. What caught my eye was a piece written by none other than the great designer Charlotte Moss in Elle Decor saying goodbye to all of that. And all of that, poignantly, is her East 71st Street townhouse, a place that I knew well.

49:01Many listeners might know I grew up on East 71st Street. My mom still lives there. And the lovely Mrs. Scully and I got married in the townhouse next door to Charlotte Moss. So it is sad to see a neighbor go. Many might know that there was a recent auction with some of the contents of Charlotte Moss's home that went up for sale. But she writes about 20 years of living in a place and all the emotion that goes along with moving out. A little bit of excitement about what might be to come. But it was poignant and sort of sad to think of Charlotte leaving the neighborhood. I wish her well and whatever comes next.

49:39Fred Nicolaus:She'll be fine. Charlotte Moss is going to be fine, is my takeaway. But it was a very poignant piece, and I love the Upper East Side lore. That's always a treat. Yes, absolutely. 71st Street misses you already, Charlotte. All right, that's all the time we have today. Thanks so much for listening. If you want to keep up with the latest news, browse job listings, or take a workshop, Visit us online at businessofhome.com. If you want to get in touch with the show, write to us at podcast at businessofhome.com. This episode was produced by Fred Nikolaus and Caroline Burke and edited by Michael Castaneda.

50:11I'm Dennis Scully. Have a great weekend, and we'll be back with you on Monday.