Growth through customer intimacy

Shopping online can be somewhat impersonal, so Foxtrot Home have gone out of their way to create a highly personalised customer experience. Customers feel connected to the Foxtrot community because the owners bring their passion, personality, and values to every interaction.

Key lessons in this case study

• Focus on creating a unique customer experience that your customers value. Building a trusted relationship with your customers will serve you well in good, and bad, times.
• Keep learning and adapting, finding new ways to reach customers and to deliver the things they value.
• Sustainability is a journey worth taking but do it a pace that allows your products to remain accessible to your customers

Prue Watson and her sister Kate set up Foxtrot Home in 2017 while Prue had a corporate career in Auckland and Kate was raising her family in the Hawke’s Bay. “Because we were geographically separated, the first decision was to start an online business,” Prue tell us. “The next decision was to specialise in natural bedding, given we both had a passion for homewares.” A business importing natural French linens and turning them into high-end bedroom products was born.

Right from the beginning Prue and Kate had a lot in common with their customers, including a preference for unique, high quality, natural products. This immediately put them in a good place to connect with their customers who are mostly women in their 30s-50s. “It’s important to us that our customers feel like they have a very personal experience. We want them to feel like they’re getting a quality product, personalised service and value for money,” Prue explains. “We want a business built on great customer service and integrity."

Learning and adapting

Foxtrot started on TradeMe with just a couple of linen lines. They quickly realised they needed their own online store and that was the start of a business that has continued to grow year-on-year. Prue went full-time into the business just as Covid hit, and while it created a couple of nervous moments, she saw it as the best decision she could have made.

Since the start of Covid, the customer base has grown exponentially and so has the product range. Prue tells us, “What makes our products unique is the quality, so we needed to give people options to see and feel that quality.” The first step was to create a service where samples were sent by courier, allowing customers to feel the textures and see the colours in their own home. It was an instant success and was soon followed by the opening of a showroom in Hawke’s Bay.

Another big realisation came through the Covid supply chain challenges. Foxtrot could see the risk in relying on overseas suppliers and looked closer to home for an answer. “We had this amazing natural fibre growing on my sister’s farm in the Hawke’s Bay. Expanding into wool products seemed like a very natural step for us,” explains Prue.

And while Foxtrot still want to largely remain directly connected with customers, they’ve decided to go into wholesale.” Prue explains, “If retailers stock the products in stores, more Kiwis can experience how wonderful our wool is.” Along with interest from local retailers, there are a number of opportunities opening up for expansion into overseas markets.

Sustainability 

Another area that Foxtrot, and their customers, are passionate about is sustainability. “Sustainability for us is all about choosing products that have the minimum impact on the environment,” outlines Prue. “At the same time, we want to offer these natural products at a price point accessible to more New Zealanders.” Foxtrot trace all their products back to their natural source and ensure there are no nasty chemical or dyes used in the production process. At the other end of the process, they store their products in reusable bags made from recycled plastic. “We’d like to go even further,” explains Prue. “So, when a cost-effective alternative to plastic is available, we’ll look to adopt it."

Connecting with customers

Prue acknowledges it’s tough times for consumers. “We saw more customers wait for our Black Friday sales last year.” Though the business increased its advertising, the focus was not on discounting prices to win business but on getting their quality and customer experience story out there. “We wanted customers to know that you get quality and value from us,” adds Prue. The approach worked, delivering Foxtrot’s best year ever, despite the tough economic conditions.

“Our customers are the most important part of our business. We connected with our community through social media by sharing our stories. It’s not just about selling products, it’s also about who we are as people and the causes we support. It allows people to know a little bit more about our values and feel part of our story,” says Prue.

Beyond social media, customers who email them receive a personal reply – and every order still goes out with a handwritten note thanking the customer for their business. Prue explains. “It’s an important part of the customer experience we want to create, so we’ll keep doing it as long as we can.”

Delivery experience 

Given how important customer experience is to the Foxtrot team, it’s not surprising how much emphasis they place on a good delivery experience. “It’s an extension of our business so the customer must feel they’ll get their order when we said they would,” Prue says. “We’re able to offer tracking from the moment the order is confirmed, giving customers peace of mind their parcel is on its way.”

Foxtrot have worked with NZ Post since the beginning, choosing them because of their reliability, reach, and the effort they make to ensure parcels get through. “We’re a small business so being able to trust NZ Post to deliver the parcels – even through natural disasters and busy sales periods - without us getting involved means we can just get on with building the business.”