From Replicas to a Unique Experience: The Life Interiors Story | #072

In this episode of Add To Cart, we are joined by Basil Karam, CEO and co-founder of online homewares store, Life Interiors. As with many in the homewares category, Life Interiors had a massive 2020 and are on track for an even bigger 2021 off the back of a replatforming over to Shopify Plus, a smart omnichannel set up and investment in technologies including augmented reality and artificial intelligence. In this chat, we hear the Life Interiors story, including how they started on eBay and as a replica furniture company - a far cry from today where they are now one of Australia’s leading furniture designers and retailers. The next frontier? A BHAG of doing $100m online! Basil is at heart a technologist and it is fascinating to get his view on how to build an online business that can scale but still be unique. 

Links from the episode:

Life Interiors

Augmented Reality at Life Interiors

Pareto Principal

Signet’s Honeycomb Mailers (sponsored)

Shopify & Rollie Nation (sponsored)

Questions answered:

What have been the most significant challenges of re-platforming for Life Interiors?What’s the relationship between online and offline for Life Interiors and how do you measure attribution for each?How and why did Life Interiors migrate from selling replica furniture to creating your own designs?

This episode was brought to you by…  

Signet

Shopify Plus

About your co-host: Basil Karam from Life Interiors

Basil is an entrepreneur with a track record of starting, growing and scaling high-growth technology enabled businesses. With more than 20 years experience delivering complex technology solutions in the cloud his expertise branches the fields of retail, technology and digital marketing. Basil is CEO of Life Interiors, a leading design-focused, technology-led vertically integrated furniture and homewares retailer on a mission to offer great design at an attainable price across several channels including retail, e-commerce and some of Australia's largest furniture and homewares marketplaces including Temple and Webster, Zanui.  Prior to Life Interiors, Basil worked at IBM implementing WebSphere e-business solutions across Telstra before moving to pureprofile a venture backed start-up to be part of the founding technical team and eventually heading up innovation in the CTO / CIO roles. 

You can contact Basil at LinkedIn

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.