VERN Edwards had plenty of cause for celebration after he secured a position on the sought-after Beaufort Street strip for his business, Arthouse Central, in 2008.
VERN Edwards had plenty of cause for celebration after he secured a position on the sought-after Beaufort Street strip for his business, Arthouse Central, in 2008.
And for the first 18 months that the photography canvassing and printing business operated in the heartland of Mount Lawley, things appeared promising.
Out of the blue, however, Mr Edwards’ commercial lease was cut short by four years and he was given two months to pack up and leave the premises.
Faced with not having a home for the business, he quickly signed a lease for a half-way-house retail space in Balcatta – a far cry from the heavy foot-traffic zone of Mount Lawley.
“I got blindsided, it was literally like getting hit by a bus. For the first three weeks I thought, that’s it, we’re out of business, what do we do? We’re a little shop in the middle of nowhere, there is no way we can carry on here,” Mr Edwards told WA Business News.
“We expected the foot traffic on Beaufort Street to generate enough business for us, which it did. And so when we left we didn’t have a website that was capable of doing transactions and we didn’t have any foot traffic here, we thought this is the end of it, start looking for a paper round.”
Mr Edwards and his wife and business partner, Sarah, decided that, in order for the business to survive, they would need to change the website to add transaction capabilities.
“We were going to just use this (Balcatta) as a place to lick our wounds and then go back in to retail but we switched everything over to web-based and then we thought, without carrying that massive retail cost, we can market a lot more efficiently,” he said.
And while Arthouse has recently recovered to the same levels of revenue as when it operated from Beaufort Street, generating a customer base on the internet has been difficult.
“Probably like a lot of people, I thought moving from a bricks and mortar [business] to an internet-based business would be easy, you just get a website and if you build it they will come. I realised it doesn’t work like that,” Mr Edwards said.
“With search engine optimisation and learning all about Google, it is a time-consuming process.
“I had to go to seminars to figure out how to get our ratings up and how to do online transactions.
“As a business owner, a lot of it is going out there and learning it yourself, I can’t pay people enough money to be interested enough in my company to do it all for me.”
Despite all the effort the Edwards have put into the online side of Arthouse, maintaining a retail space has been important to the business.
“Some people are spending over a thousand dollars, and I don’t think there are many people that feel comfortable spending a thousand dollars over the web with a company they have never seen or they can’t phone – they don’t know what the product looks like and they can’t find out,” Mr Edwards said.
“At the end of the day the customer has to be assured, if they are handing out cash over the counter, that they are going to get something of a quality they can’t get anywhere else.
“I don’t think you can only do that if there is a physical presence to the business as well.”
With the shift to the web and Balcatta, the business has undergone a change in its client base.
Mr Edwards is now working with interior designers and property developers, marketing his product for use in display homes and professional fit-outs of offices.
The product line has also changed with the demographic of the client base. Mr Edwards once focused on canvassing photography that had been brought in by clients but is now producing a lot more digital photography, where different segments of photos he takes are brought together in one image on a canvas.
“Once I moved here I was able to generate more of my own stuff because I wasn’t doing shop keeping all the time. The catalyst for that was being kicked out of Beaufort Street,” Mr Edwards said.
“We are looking at wholesaling to other retailers. It has been a complete change in the ways we do business in the last year that we hadn’t foreseen.
“If we hadn’t been kicked out, we probably would have been right back in Beaufort Street doing the same thing we had always been doing.
“It’s shaken us up a bit. They say necessity is the mother of invention … well there was a lot of inventing going on.”
