Interview

Aidan Mawhinney

The personable Living Edge CEO on the emotive nature of good design, sustainability and where Australia sits within the global community
WORDS BY RICHARD CLUNE
PHOTOGRAPHY BY WILLIAM LABOURIER

COVID was a mess for most, but for a business like yours it must have been a very unique rollercoaster – commercial channels were suddenly cut off with enforced work from home, but then ‘home’ spend was incredibly sharp?
We just didn’t know what was going to happen with sales at all. Herman Miller represents 60% of the business coming out of the US and when the US went down with Covid, nothing was coming out of the ports, so we couldn’t get any supply. Luckily they have manufacturing in China, so we shifted to China, but then clearly China had some problems of its own [laughs], so we were bouncing back and forth across Europe and the same deal, supply was incredibly difficult. When you’re already looking at a four-to-six-week manufacturing time and six-to-eight-week shipping time on a good day, well you’re looking at three to four months without the distraction of covid stuffing ports up and ships going here, there and everywhere. So yeah, it was very challenging. But then, as you say, towards the end we got to the point where couldn’t keep up with demand, the online demand was just ridiculous… It started with people buying office chairs for home because we all wanted ergonomic office chairs. And then obviously they were sitting around going, ‘actually I’m not going to leave the house now for nine months’ or however long and so they started looking at other pieces of furniture for the home. Yeah, it was crazy.  

To push on with COVID, as a business that supplies to blue-chip commercial fitouts – how do you view the changes made to the workplace and what that new ‘post-COVID workplace’ looks like? 
Everyone’s reducing space because of work from home, but also, to counter that, businesses are trying to make their spaces more like the business-lounge – more enticing to engage in getting  people back. This generally means they’re spending a little bit more on their fit out because a table tennis table doesn’t do it for everyone, but a nice lounge feeling where you can have different meetings and interact with others and at a higher level, rather than things being cheap, seems to be gaining momentum. So, a lot of the furniture now is much less related to hard desking workstations and more collaborative.

Is it important that the brands you represent can cover both commercial and residential – especially given the unparalleled and continued growth of the latter’s prime markets where Living Edge deals?
The perfect brand for us is something that can easily stretch both sides. And residential for us has been very, very strong. We’ve got a backbone of hard commercial product – that’s your desk seating, your ergonomic desks, seating, workstations; it allows us to do big projects. Then all the peripheral product on a fit out is very domesticated – it’s stuff that you could find in your home that fits both ways. And ours is quite high design, so obviously when we’re talking about the top five per cent of fit outs, the big banks and the companies that really can afford it, it’s allowed us to go and source brands we know we can put into the commercial space as well as high-end residential homes.

You’ve been pushing online sales for a while now – arguably one of the first at your level to do so. Does a Living Edge consumer really want to purchase a high-ticket piece of design sight unseen through the laptop? 
At our level, being in luxury, most people will want to feel things and I certainly couldn’t sell sofas online. But we have some products like Herman Miller, an Eames Chair – these sell online because they’re tried and trusted; they’re authentic and the real thing, you might’ve sat in somebody else’s or in one at the office and you know it. But most people want to come in and experience – they come in and tyre kick and that’s fair enough, I think that’s good. We also have a lot of aspirational purchasers — people that absolutely love design and that save up buy one chair at a time for a dining set of six. And they’ll do that online.

Staying with customers – how do you get them to become repeat buyers given your tagline  ‘Furniture For life’. Which is right – good design should mean only ever purchasing once.
We do have to find new customers but it’s also the range and the variety of what we’re trying to sell. We’ve just taken on a great outdoor brand – Roda from Italy – and we’ve never done outdoor before, so it’s a whole new channel.

You’re a man who’s done a few trips to Milan’s Salone De Mobile in your 19 years at Living Edge – is it still a worthwhile venture or has the allure and what it once was been lost to fashion labels and those cashing in on an obtuse alignment to design?
I think there’s a couple of issues that these fairs have. They’re fantastic to get the global industry of design together – Milan does that perfectly well. But it gets diluted now because it used to be about furniture and that type of design, but now you’ve got Porsche, you’ve got Lexus, you’ve got Hermes, you’ve got Chanel, you’ve got all these luxury brands jumping in on it and diluting the essence of what the fair was about. And that’s difficult then because it increases numbers – and there are a lot of partygoers who head there just because there’s an extra 500,000 people in the city. And you’ve got the situation where there’s international brands – be them German or Italian – that will spend close to half a million Euro for a week building a stand that ultimately gets pulled down and, dare I say, probably put in landfill. So you have to question that also, right? Also the savvy brands went, ‘gosh, there’s a 500,000 Euro saving during Covid when we sort of need it. So they pulled back, they then went out to spaces within the city and changed their format completely and rented empty spaces and did things with a very light touch. Walter Knoll, for example, is a brand that’s done that and will probably never go back to exhibiting 400 square metres at an exhibition hole — I don’t think people really know appreciate that it’s just such a waste and you have to consider the future then.  

That neatly segues into talking about sustainability – increasingly and rightly important in your sector but also something I know you’ve been really at the forefront of for quite some time in terms of procedure, who you work with, product and supply chain.
We have a sustainability strategy called ‘LivingOn’ which we started in 2008. And it really came from looking at replica furniture at that time. Everyone was buying knockoffs and a lot of the knockoffs were Herman Miller and Eames – these classic pieces. And it freaked me out a bit because there was this abundance of product sitting curbside on [council] clean-up days and which we knew was going to end up in landfill. It started me thinking about, well, we’ve got this company, we’re ultimately bringing in product too, but then we’re bringing in authentic pieces and that’s why we came up with ‘Furniture For Life’ as the strapline. The Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman, for example, has been in continuous production since 1956, never stopped, exactly the same today as it was then. And it’s a product that you know that when you buy it, it’ll last your life, in fact, it should become more valuable and your kids should be arguing about who’s going to get it after you. And that to me, that longevity of product is sustainability 101 – if one product can last one or two lifetimes, that’s perfect. And so that really started to underwrite the brands that we were going to start putting on – we’ve got a strict criteria for the brands that we bring on and this really drove not just the products or the brands we’re representing, but how we act as a company as well.  

You’re recently B Corp certified too?
Since 2008 we have been third party verified on a path to reduce our emissions. It was done internally as a means for us to feel better about running a business. And people sort of came and looked at it went, wow, that’s really good. Then we produced a little document to give to customers and say, ‘this is what we are doing’. And it was the very start of our communication about ‘LivingOn’ – it started as an internal thing, it wasn’t to win projects or meet customer demand it was just responsibility as an employer and as a company… We then started pushing and pushing and we became the first platinum WELL certified building in Western Australia, which is quite significant, and about four months ago became B Corp certified. 

We understand this approach – about being better – also frames the staff experience.
That’s right. With ‘LivingOn’ there’s two parts to it. There’s ‘Living Responsibly’, which is the sustainability aspect and ‘Living Well’, which is about corporate and social responsibility and the health and wellbeing of staff… It wasn’t something we set out to use but it’s now one of the biggest drivers of new talent to the business – people always cite it in interviews as one of the attractive things that we have. I still don’t think we promote it as well as we should, but it’s certainly something that we’re well known for and that’s because it’s been going for nearly 20 years now.  

To swing back to brands – how many do you stock at the moment?
We have 20 …  

Right, and of that there’s a solid mix of Australians such as David Caon in the portfolio. That wasn’t always the case – so does it speak of where domestic design sits right now, interested to learn how you perceive its standing?
I was talking to a guy from New York the other day from a company called Bauer Studios – industrial design, residential and commercial design, workplaces and homes — and he said Australia’s leading the world, which I was really impressed by. And you can sort of see that through the presence of Australian designers and in going to the likes of Milan and big events that, for a country of this size and population, we definitely bat above our weight on a global level. 

And the Australians you represent must play on that global level?
If we’re going to represent any brand they have to sit on a global level. We started working with Dave Caon – Dave’s obviously worked with Marc Newson and more recently with Qantas and he has that international flare to him and we commissioned him to design some pieces for the commercial market for us. And then that rolled into various other products through Laker, which is the JV with Henry Wilson. So, we represent Laker as well though more for the retail residential market. Alexander Lotersztain is another Australian designer from Brisbane who’s big in the commercial education sector and we’ve taken him on.   

Marc Newson holds a strong place for you personally, right?
Probably my favourite designer – I just really, really respect everything he’s done and I’ve got one of the largest private Newson collections.  

Where did that start – as a kid from Ireland and then living in England do you recall first discovering his work?
I went to in Manchester in the ‘90s where Marc had just designed a restaurant called Mash & Air. And I didn’t know who Marc was – clearly he was Australian but then I didn’t even really know where Australia was if I’m being honest, not at that time. So I went into this restaurant and thought, ‘Oh my good God, what is this?’ It was just next level, like a spaceship, and that really got me into design and interior design as something that can move you emotionally. I couldn’t believe this place and it became a haunt of mine, I just loved it. And then obviously everything that he did was quite interesting.  

To stay with Australian design as a concluding element – as consumers do you think we’ve also, finally, overcome the cultural cringe that for so long held back a local embrace of domestic design? 
I think so. And part of this is also that we’re getting much better at design. I think the only prohibitive factor here is the huge cost of labour and manufacturing to bring good quality product to market … We’ve got some of the best designers globally, but I think manufacturing is really prohibitive because it’s so expensive. I mean, I can get things manufactured in Italy and shipped to Australia much cheaper than I can get it made down the road in Sydney. So that’s really the challenge and that’s what’s going to that’s going to hold us back.