Keeping up with the #1 Pure-play Kitchenware Store: How family-run Everten sustains growth and customers

Tell us about Everten Love to Cook 

We're a family-owned business that specializes in all things kitchenware and the largest online kitchenware store in Australia that's 100% pure-play online. 

Kitchenware continues to grow at a rapid rate in the e-commerce space. Over the last two years, we’ve seen dramatic changes in the way customers like to shop and a spike in the popularity of cooking from home.

Alongside this came the emergence and growth in popularity of Meal-delivery apps as well as express grocery delivery from the supermarket chains, cooking from home has become more convenient and popular than ever before. Adding to this is the continued rise in popularity of cooking shows on both Free-to-Air TV. Streaming apps have contributed to the shift towards home cooking, and perceptions have changed from ‘ a task that must be done; into an enjoyable  hobby and way to connect both offline and online worlds.

We feel we cater best for this shift in behaviour by our breadth of range, easy to use website and speed in fulfillment. Whether a customer is looking for new cookware or knife block set, a new dinner set or wine glasses for entertaining we aim to be the first name that comes to mind for home cooks or professional chefs.

We see it as our mission for customers to find a love and passion for cooking in a fast-paced digitalised world and we’re constantly in search of new innovations that allow us to connect more deeply with our customers and understand how we can meet rising demand and adapt to changes in consumer behaviour.

How does Everten differ from other kitchenware stores?

We really pride ourselves on our level of service, both in terms of our store UX, customer service, speed in fulfillment and choice of delivery options. Unlike a large proportion of other pureplay stores, our entire customer service team is also on-shore and Sydney-based, many with a background working in the hospitality industry or in kitchenware, helping them truly understand the products. 

Staff undergo consistent product training to ensure a company culture that is striving towards innovation and efficiency. Why that is important? Because our customer service team is connected to the warehouse operations which creates less friction for customers. Whether it's inspecting a customer's return to identifying a fault and confirming it with the customer it closes the gap between bricks and mortar and online. There's a strong value to having your customer service team on-shore, especially in Australia.

We consider ourselves a long-tail kitchenware store where we stock extensive ranges in each of our categories. Many stores these days limit their breadth of range or collections of certain brands or categories to a small selection or the top sellers. We pride ourselves in offering for example in a tableware collection, the entire product story so that you don't have to shop elsewhere to complete the set or collection.

Our long-standing trading relationships with suppliers as well as the economies of scale that have been established maintain our competitive advantage both in terms of supply, pricing and fulfilment. Being this size with the amount of traffic and years we have been operating gives us a large amount of data that we can utilise to make better purchasing and marketing decisions.

For example, we leverage our data to know which cities in Australia to target with advertising to achieve a better ROAS, our buying team knows which types of products sell more frequently than others, which types be purchased more frequently together in a range so that while we may stock an entire collection, we’ll know which individual pieces to stock larger supply of. It’s also vital to know how frequently your customers purchase with you so that you know when the best time is to retarget and in what way. Segmentation is important as not every customer is the same in their purchasing behaviors especially in kitchenware where seasonality isn’t as important as fashion for example.

Lastly, we are an environmentally conscious business which is why we pack orders boxes custom made to size and of recycled cardboard to reduce waste. We protect fragile items like dinner sets and glassware by using 100% biodegradable packaging beans made of cornstarch instead of polystyrene or bubble wrap.

What has been integral to Everten's growth and success?

Apart from having the customer mindset at the forefront of our business decisions, having a deep understanding of all elements of a business by working and being exposed to each department is a unique part of working in a family business. In the earlier years I worked across almost every facet of the business which helped to shape my understanding in where to make improvements. Insights into the customer journey that could only be realised by assisting customers directly via voice and livechat to physically picking customer orders and noticing purchasing behaviours that would help us work with our web developers to improve parts of the website to make shopping easier or faster.

Examples: Manually recommended product suggestions based on knowledge of the product. In this case a specific type of knife sharpener from the same brand is recommended which can be used on all of the knives in the knife block set. The chopping board set is matching in colour, eco-friendly and safe for knife edges while also having a variety of board sizes to cater for the large and small knives in the set.

UX: Having a long-tail website with over 20 000 products can lead to analysis paralysis and difficult navigating many categories across the website. To overcome this, we use grouped product imagery to visually represent the subcategories with the least amount of cognitive load on the customer. This is especially helpful for customers who have English as a second language or may not know the correct name for the product they are shopping for.

Improving our operations has also been a crucial factor to our growth and customer experience that proved itself greatly during the pandemic’s surge in online purchasing and fulfilling orders during peak sale periods like Black Friday and Boxing Day. Even during our busiest periods we’re able to dispatch express orders the same business day and regular orders the next business day.

We’ve made significant improvements to our storage and dispatch sections of our warehouse such as our special racking that has greatly improved SKU management, improved picking speeds and reduced human error.

What do you envision for Everten in the future?

We want to continue to grow our longtail offering with a product base broader and wider so that we are always the first thought by customers as the source for anything kitchenware, expanding our delivery options and increasing interaction with our customers in more innovative ways so that we aren’t just seen as a shop but also a resource to learn and improve their knowledge and passion for cooking.

With the growth in Asian markets in e-commerce, we see a lot of opportunity to expand into rapidly growing markets like Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. We have a significant portion of our digital team already based in Malaysia and believe we have a lot to offer in terms of product offering and service that is currently unavailable in those markets.

Meet David alongside other panelists on the 16th February @ 11am on ' Question the Leaders: Customer-centricity, a buzzword for ages but few have managed to truly embrace it – How to walk the talk and make customers central to your business decisions'