Road to Retail: Leap of Faith

0:00You would have told me, Fred, you're not going to make a sale in those first four days. I would have said no problem. You want to be able to make it so that when someone comes into your space that they're a part of your world, they understand that this is who you are as a brand. Today, I think it's just a recognition of the effort that the team has put into the store.

0:39A lot of people ask, why expand into retail?

0:46Fair question, right? Why retail? Benjamin Godley back with Road to Retail, a Shopify miniseries. Each Thursday of this month, you'll hear the stories of the folks behind the brand Cozy and their experience moving from an online-only store to opening their first physical location. This is episode two, Leap of Faith. If you missed our first installment, please check out the Shopify Masters feed to get caught up.

1:18It is minutes before the grand opening of Frederick Obey's first permanent retail store. You met Fred for the first time last episode. He's the founder and CEO of the Canadian furniture company, Cozy. Fred, what's it feel like when you look at your store from out here? It's an exciting day for Cozy. It really is. In our journey, you know, we talked about our long-term journey to become the world's leading furniture company, and this marks as a big step for us. Not as the end, not as the beginning, but just another step in our journey. And I feel proud of what the team accomplished over the last 18 months.

1:59and today I think it's just a recognition of the effort that the team has put into the store.

2:12Fred is working off of one hour's sleep. He flew into Toronto last night from a work trip across Asia and stayed up all night to shake his jet lag. But you couldn't tell just by looking at him. He's running on pure adrenaline, awake yet calm and confident.

2:31His morning mirrors that of his team. Last minute prep work, meetings with the store staff. One customer even showed up an hour early.

2:45Before the store officially opens, Fred walks me through the layout. So we've got the opening hours, which are pretty lengthy for a store. 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on weekdays. We're walking into a cushion wall room as an entry, giving us a nice perspective of the store. Here we have our most popular model, the Cielo XL and Night Sky, followed to our left by our window, which is the cushion ring with a vela chair, a very popular vela chair, and our first table, the Stella lift top. The window display takes up the entire width of the store, And the furniture that sits there is on top of a white crochet-like raised floor.

3:28So we actually wanted to create the effect of a cloud, something that would be cozy, that people would look up to when walking from the street, but also gives this concept of comfort that we're all about. You can tell the team spent months designing this space. And if you've been to Cozy's website and you look at this showroom, you'll probably start connecting some dots. Something looks familiar. You feel like, oh, I just walked into the Cozy website. Torian Scotland is this store's manager, and there's perhaps no one more anxious about today than him. There's cohesion, he says, between the digital, which came first, and the physical store.

4:10Dogmatic, almost, in its embrace of being omnichannel. So when you look at the Cozy site, the colors, and even the photography that we have for all of our setups, Like if you look at the rings that we have here, it looks exactly like our Instagram photos. So you want to be able to make it so that when someone comes into your space that they're a part of your world, they understand that this is who you are as a brand. And it has all the fun things that makes your brand special.

4:41The first customers and their families walk in minutes after the team unlocks the door. Some have been counting down the days. I waited for this. That's Sean, who came by the store with a friend of his own, who owns a different cozy couch than the one that he wanted. So I was going to get a couch maybe two months ago, and we were just waiting for this place to open to try it out first, mostly because of the hassle with returning things if they don't work out. This one, the atmosphere is definitely more cushiony than I was expecting. It looks a little bricky, but it's really comfortable. The atmosphere is one of the couch styles that Cozy sells on its website, and now in person.

5:18But getting to this moment didn't happen overnight.

5:27I get this idea early 2019. In March 2019, I'm in China visiting suppliers. Once Fred felt confident about his idea, he started looking for the right manufacturer. We started in Shanghai, close to Shanghai. Then we made our way south to Guangzhou and ended in Guangzhou. I spent, you know, 10 days there talking to people, visiting suppliers. And I come back, I say, okay, if I'm going to start this company, it's going to be probably made in China because I wanted a great price. And it was going to be impossible to do it in Canada. Fred gets back to Montreal, and he starts researching his competition.

6:09What are they doing? What are the most popular styles? And then I hire a industrial design firm out of Montreal to help me with the design, with the assembly, with the concept. And we start playing around with some concepts, send some drawings, some manufacturers in China, they start building prototypes, we tweak the hardware, I think they make three or four samples. Okay, one's good enough, let's send to Montreal, let's send to Canada for me to evaluate. And it comes out, it's pretty good. It's not perfect, but there's something there. This is almost a year of work now. Back and forth with the manufacturers.

6:44And finally, the first product is ready by the end of December 2019. It's one sofa, one style of arms, four colors. You've got three types of boxes. You've got arms, seats, and ottoman. The site goes live in 2020 during the pandemic. You might remember manufacturing goes absolutely dormant in China for a while. There are shipping delays. Fred has no idea when his furniture is coming or what to expect. He trusts his idea. He's done his research. But still. You work for a year and a half on this project. You don't know if people are going to put their credit cards to buy a sofa from a company they've never heard of.

7:23And then you make a sale in the first 30 minutes while the site is not even up. So a lot of relief on that first order. Then a second order comes in a few hours later. And I think that first day, that's it.

7:40Two sales on the first day of his online store.

7:48Just a couple of hours in here at the retail space, and the retail sales start pouring in. It catches Fred off guard. It's really surprising. You know, you would have told me, Fred, you're not going to make a sale in those first four days, you know, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, I would have said no problem. And we've made three in the first two hours. Customers begin flooding the store and many are interested in seeing just how this modular furniture that they've seen online actually works in person. You know, I keep throwing around this word, modular. And what I mean is that you can rearrange your sofa depending on your space.

8:24It's that easy, no matter who comes over. You can see how this works online, but Fred says it's important to have this option in person too. The Cozy team has miniature plastic models of their sofa pieces on display, so customers can play around with different layouts. Yeah, so they're actually like almost like big Legos where you can create your own configuration. And they stand on a piece of paper to mock up your living room. It's a piece of graph paper. Correct. A piece of graph paper that is to scale with the sofa and we'll add tables in there as well so you can really create your living room with our associates, really get a good feel of proportions, of dimensions, create your own configuration.

9:08And it comes back to, you know, mixing the digital world and the physical world. People like to touch, feel, play with it with their own hands and that's what we've tried to do. I think whether you're 75 or whether you're 5, I think this is a great tool for everybody to use.

9:28So it's just after three o 'clock here in Toronto. We're at the cozy retail store, the first store they've ever opened. There have been customers coming in throughout the day. And the interest has been incredibly high. There are folks who have come by who have said, I've been waiting for months just to touch this couch. And it really solidifies the thought that Fred has, which is that folks still want to come and sit on their furniture before they buy it. Despite the fact that he is a digital first company, this physical space remains an important part of his growth strategies. I think people were on the fence for a very long time about buying a sofa that they hadn't tried in person.

10:10And, I mean, from the reaction of our Instagram posts, our social posts, TikTok, I think people are just really excited that they can try the cozy furniture. and we're waiting for this for weeks, months, years for some, possibly. It's awesome. So it's just fun to see, yeah. Waiting for weeks for opening day, months for construction to wrap up, permits to be pulled, inspectors to inspect. Years for Fred's idea, Cozy, to be realized. So far, it's off to a good start. Coming up on Road to Retail, Impact of in-person. Has the bet actually paid off for Cozy? and what role did Shopify's point of sale system play in its success?

10:50Road to Retail is produced by Megan Coyle, Gogo Zoger, and Schweng Esther Shan, mixed and mastered by Matt Schwartz, production assistance from Miku Betlam. If you've enjoyed this episode, please let us know in the comment section wherever you listen to your podcasts. Again, I'm Benjamin Gottlieb and this has been episode two of Road to Retail, Leap of Faith. Until next time, take care.

11:15Thank you.