50 years of furniture: How Dean Ramler created Australia’s leading online furniture store Milan Direct

For more than 50 years the Ramler family has worked in the furniture industry, and there’s nothing Dean Ramler would prefer to be doing.

Co-founding Milan Direct with high school friend Ruslan Kogan, the pair pioneered the online furniture market in late 2006. Prior to this Ramler had worked in the family business for eight years as a teenager.

Ramler had walked with his grandfather through the factory floors and seen first-hand what it took to manufacture furniture, with his dad and uncle teaching him how to run a business.

While buying furniture online now seems normal, in 2006, Ramler says, people thought he was “crazy”.

But with the rise of the internet, Ramler saw the opportunity for an affordable online furniture retailer.

His background in the industry meant he already had a support network and mentors to guide him through the process, and while he was only 24 at the time, he saw his youth as an advantage.

In the 2012-13 financial year the business turned over $15 million and it has now sold over 700,000 pieces in 40 countries. Next year, Ramler is anticipating it will exceed $20 million in turnover.

Ramler spoke to SmartCompany about becoming Australia’s leading online designer furniture retailer, focusing on the Australian market and designing on-trend products.

Name: Dean Ramler

Company: Milan Direct

Location: Melbourne, Victoria

Mornings

Unsurprisingly, Ramler is an early riser.

“I get up at 5am and go straight to the gym and it’s a good way to get your energy going,” he says.

“I’m in the office by around 6am. A lot of my friends think I go to the office really early, but I just jump out of bed and want to get going.”

For Ramler, getting up early isn’t a chore.

“Some of our competitors brag that they don’t start work till much later, but I like to get a head start.”

Daily life

Ramler’s role in the business has changed over time, having tried his hand at all facets of the daily operations.

“My role has evolved a lot in that for every process, both Ruslan and I will have created the process, run it, and then handed it off to somebody else to manage,” he says.

“I’ve been import manager, marketing manager, basically every single role. But as it’s gotten bigger we’ve had to delegate the roles.”

Today, Ramler oversees operations, but he’s maintained an understanding of how it all works.

“I haven’t wanted to let go of certain roles. When it’s a business you’ve created, it’s your baby and you don’t want to let someone else drop the baby.

“But the only way to grow at such a fast rate is to be able to let go of some of the roles and responsibility.”

Seeing his family operate in a “hands-on” way running their own furniture business, Ramler has taken the same approach to Milan Direct.

“I’m very hands-on on the factory floor throughout Asia (where the products are manufactured) and that’s a competitive advantage we have,” he says.

“Other competitors would be ordering stuff blindly, but I’m in China five to six times a year working with improving the product and the quality of the packaging. That’s the number one role I wouldn’t give up.”

Ramler says the key thing differentiating Milan Direct from the other online furniture stores is its product range.

“We have thousands of products in three or four main categories and we want to be number one in all the categories.

“We find other competitors are good in select categories, but we compete across every category we are in. We’re probably the only online Aussie furniture retailer which is global,” he says.

In 2009 Milan Direct set up a UK version of the site to sell furniture around Europe. To ensure Milan Direct is stocking the best products, it uses analytics from Google to guide its product stockings.

“That’s guided a lot of our decision making. So we use this combined with a strong social media community – we’ll post products in different categories and ask our community if they’d purchase the products,” Ramler says.

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