now has more than 100 wholesale accounts, including department store Myer. A 120sqm boutique at Melbourne’s Emporium last month is Morrison’s seventh store, with Poulson, saying, “rationalisations from a few years ago are currently producing fruit”. Each Morrison store is different, but carries a common thread of curved racking, to give a clean, flowing line through the store and racks. “The Emporium store is probably the highest spec store that we’ve done, and that was because the centre had lifted the standard to be very high end,” said Poulson. Inspired by the natural surroundings of the company’s home in Fremantle, the Emporium store has European oak floors, softly lit French lights, timber window frames, and linen curtains made in the oldest linen mill in the world in Belgium. Poulson told Inside Retail PREMIUM further store openings in Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane can be expected in the next 12 to 18 months, along with a pop up store in Melbourne before the end of the year. A soft launch of a new simplified website took place last month, with four clicks to purchase a key feature. Four per cent of sales come from online, but Poulson expects this will more than double in the next 12 months. The brand has invested heavily in social media, consulting an expert who has previously worked on social media campaigns for Richard Branson, to assist with creating online strategies to harness the power of Facebook. “The thing about online is that you can pretty much monitor everything. You can monitor how many clicks and how long people spend on certain things, and therefore, what is more popular, and that is really interesting and not typical of retailing in the past.” Poulson said the brand’s strategy has been to concentrate on getting rid of the unnecessaries in the business, and “focus on what we actually need, as opposed to what we want”. “That’s been very difficult for me to get my head around”.