No sleeping on the job in the bed business

By LIBBY MIDDLEBROOK

Dave Macfarlane quit school at 15 with no qualifications.

While the educational system might have groaned with disappointment at the loss of another young unqualified student, it is probably resting a lot easier these days when it comes to Mr Macfarlane.

Today the 40-year-old Tauranga man runs Design Mobel, a bedroom furniture-manufacturing business that earns more than $10 million each year.

Already number one in the flexible slat bed market, the 10-year-old company sells hundreds of top-of-the-range beds and cabinets to retailers throughout New Zealand and Australia - generating more than 30 per cent of company turnover in sales.

Not bad for a man who once did not expect to leave the ranks of employee during his working life.

``I left school when I was 15 with no qualifications and I served my time as a joiner and did a variety of things, from teachers' college for a year, built boats for a little while, but it wasn't quite for me.

``Then I decided to start up my own business,'' Mr Macfarlane says.

In the past four years Design Mobel has won more than 10 national and international design awards for its beds, which are all made at the company's Tauranga factory base from sustainably harvested native New Zealand timber.

Mr Macfarlane says the design of the furniture and the health benefits offered by Design Mobel beds are the two most important factors in the company's success.

The company's environmental policy, which sees one tree planted for every bed and furniture suite sold, has also had a positive impact on the sales.

``I've got a crook back. I went to Europe and slept in one of these flexible slat beds and thought it was the best thing since sliced bread.

``Fortunately they have done really well here, too.''

But it was not all sweet dreams when Mr Macfarlane first entered the furniture industry.

During the mid-1980s he set up a furniture company called Osca Manufacturing with two others, producing a wide range of furniture for the New Zealand market.

Three years later, he sold out because of a dispute with his partners over the company's direction.

``We tried to do all things to all people and cover all areas,'' says Mr Macfarlane, who wound up buying Osca Manufacturing back from the receivers in 1989 for about $120,000.

He renamed the company Design Mobel which would eventually specialise in top-of-the-line bedroom furniture and flexible slat beds, which sell for more than $1500 each.

The first few years were difficult as the company had to tackle credibility issues in the market.

``Probably one of the hardest things taking over the defunct company was getting people to trust you. The old company had left a lot of debt with the suppliers I wanted to deal with and it was hard to get them on side.

``It was just about having good cash flow and paying on time and it has just flowed on from there.''

Mr Macfarlane says his lack of education, business knowledge and management experience were also initial stumbling blocks.

He solved this by surrounding himself with experienced business executives.

``The hardest thing, from my own point of view, was the fact that I did not have a good education.

``To go from a factory situation to managing a company with millions of dollars' worth of turnover, it was pretty hard to become a manager.

``To be quite honest, I have become a bit of a manager only in the last year of so.

``That is because I have surrounded myself with a sales manager, a marketing manager a production, manager ... really good people.''

Meanwhile, Design Mobel sees its future in export markets such as Australia.

After failing to build up a reasonable market share in Australia in 1994 through an agent, the company took a different direction three years ago.

It is now selling its products through the country's largest bed retailer, Captain Snooze, which has more than 80 stores.

``The only way to increase our market in New Zealand was to shift down the market and it's something that would have tarnished our brand so we did need to go overseas.

``In Australia our agent was a dead loss; we basically had no growth at all.

``So we bit the bullet and employed a full-time guy and got a warehouse over there.

``We went from 1 per cent of turnover to 9 per cent in one year.''

Design Mobel, which hopes to generate 50 per cent of sales through exports during the next two years, has plans to enter the market in the United States.