Good morning, Paula. It's so great to have you. Thank you very much. Coming to you live from Sydney, everyone. Paula, we've been working together for a while now. We're gonna do a little journey back in time together, but I think let's start off with giving you the chance to introduce yourself and the great work you're doing at Freedom Furniture and why it is so important to have a complex Freedom Furniture help you find the right type furniture for your home. Over to you. Morning, Alex. Thank you for having me. It's lovely to have this conversation with you today. So as you mentioned, I'm Paula Mitchell. I am the digital general manager at Freedom. I've been there for five years. Freedom is it's been part of the Australian home over forty years. We're a highly trusted brand. We have sixty stores across Australia and New Zealand. We've been going on a bit of a transformation journey since about twenty twenty that I've had the privilege of of being a part of. And and, you know, my role in that was around the the digital experience, and we've definitely been approaching that from an omnichannel first mindset. So furniture's high consideration. It's a a high ticket purchase. And, you know, we know that our customers are definitely being fluid between whether they shop online or in store and how they're going about that kind of browsing behavior. And, you know, especially in a high tech high tech categories that we have, like sofa and mattress, customers wanna touch, feel, sit. And so, you know, product discovery for us at Freedom was just wasn't just about customers, you know, searching. They're researching. So they're looking for for the inspiration, something that's gonna be beautiful in their homes, and they're comparing all of the materials and the finishes and and validating what style is gonna fit in their home. So, you know, they're building confidence before they're committing to that purchase. So search for us, you know, wasn't just about being something functional, this tool that had to sit on the on the site and then then play this role. It was, you know, really around a confidence building tool that was gonna help our customers make the right decision. And as our, you know, catalog expanded a couple of years ago from ten thousand to forty five thousand products, search and discovery was just mission critical for us. So we really had to make some changes quickly. Thank you. Something very personal when you and I discuss. Right? You bring something in your home. It's it's your style. It's your taste. Right? We wanna make sure Yep. That you you you service the the needs of a a customer of yours that, you know, visits the Freedom site and and really finds that that product that matches their style fast. Right? Right. So going back, as you said a little bit back in time now to the time before we met each other, to the time when when and maybe finding the black sofa wasn't always the easiest. Tell us all a little bit about where you were at. You talked about the growth in your catalog. Right? You talked about discoverability issues back then. I think you had a key strategy to drive a marketplace approach, right, where you grew your your offerings quite significantly. Walk us through a little bit about where you were at before that that moment where we had the joy to run into each other. Yeah. I think, you know, when you look at furniture stores and you're shopping in store, you can only fit a certain amount of products within a store. They don't have rubber walls. So we utilized or we saw the opportunity for our on-site channel just to have this endless aisle of all these beautiful curated products that you might not be able to see in store, but you could still shop via Freedom. And that just kind of brought a few challenges from a an on-site technical experience. We're an SAP commerce platform. We were using solar as kind of the search engine, and I think we just hit a ceiling around its limitations. You know, it didn't have that kind of natural language understanding. We were all getting really frustrated internally with the results, and you mentioned the black sofa. So when you search for a black sofa and you get a white one, you know, the eye rolls and just the the frustration internally, so you can imagine what our customers were thinking. It was almost got to a point of being embarrassing, where I didn't want anyone to open that search box in a meeting or show me because I knew how how bad it was. So search was just becoming was becoming harder from a a customer perspective. But then as the catalog blew out, and we only had a small team, you know, of of two people, and we now have forty five thousand products. Merchandising thousands of category pages was just so time consuming, and it was basically taking their almost their whole entire week. And we're coming into a promotion. It was taking us a week just to get ready for a promotion to get all these category pages ready manually one by one. So it was time consuming. It was painful. You know, search engagement was dropping, so that's obviously impacting conversion. And it was just you know, we're seeing the abandoning search was just becoming problematic, and customers were just reverting back to just going through categories and taking them longer to find what they want. So it wasn't a great experience, and we just outgrown what we had. So, you know, listening to the customer feedback and seeing the frustration and hearing it from the stores, we knew that we had to go out and just find something better to improve that on-site experience. Yeah. And I think that's the the key moment, right, when we you went through an RFP process, quite a for RFP, I have to say. So, obviously, you have an ace team that put together quite a quite an assessment. I do wanna call out their names, by the way, because I think it's an amazing team, people like Federico and and Alicia and others and a great, great team. And I think the my understanding going back to that time was that the key focus was to not just find a technology, but also a partner that you can work with. And I think the focus that we saw clearly is the need to drive this automated AI driven change. So let's go a little bit forward in time to that moment when you made the decision. We started to work together. Walk us all through a little bit about this change of experience and and how together with Freedom and Coveo, we we brought that to life. So what did that look and feel like on your side? Wait. Here, remember the RFP. The RFP document went out. We were looking for a search and merge provider. Right? Like, it was as simple as that. And and getting into the process and meeting the Coveo team and having the the conversation and getting that platform demo, I think we all walked out with, you know, jaws on the floor going, we don't want a search and merge tool. We want a product discovery tool that's AI driven, that's kinda next gen, and and we ended up getting a lot more than kinda what we went out shopping for, and how it's kind of now integrated into our platform. I think and also too during the conversations and unpacking, you know, through the demo and and meeting the team, you're right about building a partnership and and how we wanna work together with our partners. Know, I always say I don't wanna be that person, you know, where the phone rings and they don't they don't wanna answer. I wanna be excited to have a partnership and build together. So the connection, I think, that was made in that room in the first hour was really important to me knowing that the team were in safe hands when they're gonna be you know, when we come with either challenges or opportunities, or how do we work together in the future, and how was this partner invested in our business so that they're challenging us and pushing us hard. Because when you work in the retail space and you're moving at a million miles an hour, you often forget sometimes about all these tools you've got and, you know, making sure you're squeezing the lemon and getting the most out of the technology that you have. So I think they were probably the two levels of comfort straight up in that process that we knew we were on, you know, a little bit of a winner there. And and, you know, the speed to market was also surprising for us. You know? Normally, these these products or projects can take, you know, six, nine, twelve months. And I think within three months, we were up running. We were moving. We were learning. Things were happening. The team, I think, was so excited by the technology and what it was doing. It was it wasn't it didn't feel like a grind to them to get this up and running. They were so motivated to to work on this project and and, you know, see it come to life. So I think December last year, twenty twenty four, so just over a year now, we were able to launch the product within the website right before, you know, the our Boxing Day sales that we have here in Australia. And and, you know, it was definitely this this shift from this environment we had that was so rule heavy. We had all this, you know, high control just to of totally AI led optimization. So our merchandising team just had this totally new focus on how they were going about their day. So they weren't sitting there dragging products around a PLP page, like losing the will to live. It was it was exciting as to watch it do dynamic and watch it change in front of you. And and as people would walk past it, they're going, if you check this out, have a look. And just the vibe was, you know, really exciting to watch. You know, watching or seeing the automation that, you know, is gonna handle our scale now. You know, we were forty five thousand products when we went live, you know, fourteen months ago. Now we're up around seventy five thousand product mark. So and we've been able to handle that scale so seamlessly. And, you know, the merchandising and and everything we do on a day to day basis is still the same as what it was when there was forty thousand products. So as we shoot for a thousand hundred thousand products, we know we're in really good hands for for the tool to be able to handle us as we grow. And just watching, you know, the real time behavioral data driven product placement, you know, the merchandise team got a little bit, you know I'm trying to find the right word. Maybe a bit anxious early, you know, but my favorite product isn't at the top. We go, yeah, but your customer doesn't want the favorite product. They want this product. So the intense signals that, you know, the customers were showing and it was changing. And there was definitely, know, lots of questions in the early days, but now I think that it's been a year and everyone's kinda understanding what, what it is that we're doing. The, you know, the noise is definitely quiet down. Everyone's excited about it. So we were able to roll out a number of tools kind of over the last fourteen months. We started with the AI powered search and the dynamic product page listing. So that was kind of the first things that we rolled out that was, you know, game changing, number one. And then we, you know, fast followed with AI driven recommendations, and that was another function on our site where the team is sitting there matching a with b and c with d and doing it all manually. So now that that just happens automagically, it was my favorite word, it's awesome to see. Yes. We can guide. We can guide and direct, and we can give it a little bit of a nudge if we need to. But for the most part, no. It's not necessary. Dynamic facets are now part of our model and just the and the AI led merchandising optimization and just all these functions that we've been able to roll out in the last fourteen months has just been fantastic. So we've moved from this, you know, manually grinding tasks to be totally AI led, you know, to optimize the performance, and it's just changed everything we've done from, you know, what our customer is experiencing on the front end to our team's daily operating rhythm. So we're really proud of where we've come. So I think we we you you had some great success with us. We as you said, we've been live since December twenty twenty four. We're just coming up to year mark, and now we're talking to the team about really exciting things next. And that's with this little time journey, wanna go with you to based on these outcomes and the ecosystem of AI that where, you know, things are moving fast, where is your head at? Where is your strategy at? What are we working on with together to go to next? Ugh. The list the list is long, but, I mean, just to go back to one of the points you made about search adoption is I think I had a misguided view coming into furniture where, you know, I was kind of told that people don't search in furniture because they just come through the categories. But I think what I've learned over the last twelve months is that was probably a statement made because the search was bad. So we were talking to ourselves, accepting that this was the right metric, whereas we just had the wrong tool. So putting the wrong tool in and now seeing the engagement and the repeat engagement, I think, has built the confidence in that we need to continue to expand on what this does and how we can just provide that way better experience for our customers. So, you know, I I think one of the the beauties and I was discussing this, you know, last night with a with a a colleague in a similar industry around our partnership with Coveo has just been this constant evolution of of road map. So, you know, watching the teams bounce ideas off together and look at, you know, how we're gonna build this road map together has been, you know, super exciting. So, you know, we're we're definitely working on adopting even more AI models to improve this experience. So we've recently adopted listing page optimization to drive better performance for product placement. So just, you know, where those customers are constantly browsing, exploring to, you know, help that process. I'm most excited that we're in the process of rolling out conversational product discovery. So we've been working on that for a little while and how we're feeding that model to make sure it's gonna be super relevant for our customers and, you know, trying to build that on-site experience that mimics the in store experience. So, you know, you talk about walking into, you know, a Tiffany or a Gucci store, and the associate makes you feel special. They get to know your style, your preference, your purchase history, and they just guide you naturally. Like, that you don't feel like they're pushing products onto you, but they're curating things in the background and and giving options that fit you. That's the kind of experience that we're really trying to bring into our digital ecosystem. So we really see the future as offering our customers this endless choice. So traditional search experience for those that know exactly what they want, where they can kinda come through the navigation if they're coming up as a mission shopper. So I know what I want. I want a bedside table. Off I go. There's my journey. Or maybe you're moving home. You're moving into a new space. You're not really sure what you want. You want to kind of be inspired. And so we're now working on another kind of shopping experience where we'll ask the customer to give us some guidance around what things they like and dislike, and then we can start to curate different things for them, to help maybe guide them or push them. There's a a bit of a view that you could look at a sofa in a picture. It might be a black leather sofa, and you look at it in like an urban style setting, and you hate that sofa because of the setting that it's in. But if I give that to you in a a natural light, you know, maybe a boucle fabric and put it in a beach scene, that's probably more your vibe. And so now I love the sofa, but it was the same sofa just in a different fabric in a different setting. So we're working on kind of all the content and then working with Coveo and the team as to how we can surface that in kind of this natural product discovery, both in store. We're trialing some kiosks and and online through the website. So, you know, just trying to help customers find exactly what they want. And I think that's probably what we're gonna focus on for the next twelve months. Oh, that's exciting. That's exciting. And I think the the key experience I wanna call out here is and I call it the drive time with your team because your team definitely is you know, for those of out there don't know, you're a big fan of Formula one. Right? So you're driving a fast team. It's it's just joyful to see that, you know, we can build a partnership where people feel comfortable, you know, on their way home from work. They they wanna bounce off ideas with a partner like us. It's something really unique. And, yeah, I always call it the drive time with the Freedom team that is that is quite joyful. So based on based on those and thanks for sharing those insights on where you're going. But based on those experiences, what would you recommend to somebody out there that that is on that journey? You made a couple of comments on that throughout our conversation, things like, you know, when you started the RFP process, you were very focused on finding, you know, a hammer for the nail that you thought needs to needs to be focused on. Right? And and then fast forward to where we are today where, you know, with your team, we're trying to, you know, apply Agentic AI commerce experiences that span digital into in store. Right? So and that's within the the twelve months time that we had together being live on the digital ecosystem. So what can a leader out there that is listening to this takeaway? What would you recommend to think about? What would you do differently if you could go back in time? So over to you, Paula. Walk us through about some high level suggestions for those out there. Yeah. I think I'll my my general comment even within the team is it's not just about having technology for technology's sake. Like, it needs to have a meaning. It needs to have a purpose. So, you know, you can have all the plug ins, but what's it actually driving, and how are you delivering that bottom line, you know, ROI against the cost of your technology stack? So, you know, for us, it was listening to the customers and and even internal customers as well. So our buying and merchandising team, so what feedback are they giving us, and what frustrations do they have? And then, you know, go out and and solve a problem with intent, you know, rather than just putting or plugging in the the most, you know, latest shiny tool. So that's probably number one is make sure you've got a clear purpose and a clear ROI objective because that's obviously gonna you know, we're all here to to build and drive profitable businesses. And then I think it's around having trust, building trust in the tool, firstly, in you inside your the the immediate digital team, but then the wider team. Because once that's done, the customer trust just comes naturally. So I talked before about the adoption from our merchandise team and bringing them on a journey. Because, historically, they would send a list of products, and they would dictate how things need to sit based on, you know, whether they've backed it in, that it's gonna be a best seller. It might be on a really great price. We might have a lot of shop. And so to take that control away and let the tool do its magic is initially a shock factor. But when you start to and, you know, obviously, being technology, we're so data rich now in how customers are interacting with the PLP and the PDP and and the conversion that it's driving and the average order uplift that it's driving. So being able to show them the stats and how it's actually working and, you know, driving engagement, leading to sales. They then build their own trust insights. So then you can let the automation, you know, prove itself and then just work its magic. And then you have, you know, less and less hands on all the time. In terms of conversational, you know, everyone's talking about AI and shopping assistance and but when you look under the hood, you know, nobody's really nailed it just yet, I don't think. So it's more of a where do we want to go. And, you know, there's there's some that are kinda getting there and they're chipping away, but there's definitely, you know, some experiences that you can see of people are trying to work on it and build up, and they're learning. Right? Which is great and so are we. So it's it's important to get it right because, you know, that poor first impression could really erode the customer trust, and regaining it is difficult. So, you know, setting it up in a a back end staging environment and getting your internal team to test, test, test, and pressure test, and ask crazy questions, and thinking outside the box, and even using ChatGPT to spit you all the example questions you should be putting into it, I think is gonna be really important to make sure that, you know, it's gonna be relevant when you go live, it's giving the customer the best experience. And and I think what we're then looking forward to next is the results that we get from it. How do we adopt our internal operating model to continue to feed the beast? So what what's it gonna tell us around what we might not have, what content we're lacking, maybe what products we're missing, and how do we feed that across the wider business into the merch team or into the content team to try and, you know, fill the gaps of what it's trying to find that it can't so to ensure that we can continually improve that experience. So, you know, even though we spend less time now dragging products around merchandising a page, we're spending more time on such more meaningful tasks to build to build a better experience. So definitely think about that. It's, you know, not about really a headcount saving as you put these tools in. It's a headcount optimization and how you use AI within your teams just to really deliver much more meaningful tasks to their days and to the business overall. That's that's beautiful. Paula, from a happy customer of Freedom Furniture with, you know, my home being styled by your brand to to just to working with your team. It's a delight, and I'm really happy we had a minute to talk together about a little journey back in time. I'm looking forward what's up ahead. I think I wanna finish with just one comment. As always, great teams need a great leader, and it's great to work with leaders in the industry. So if you're out there and thinking about buying a furniture in Australia, you know where to go. And just watch this space because in very short time, you might be getting some style guidance that gets you to the right sofa faster. And with that, Paula, huge thank you from me for your time. Amazing insights, and talk to you soon. Thank you, Alex. I always love chatting with you.