Retail
Amara
“Our aim is to be the largest independent retailer of luxury home fashion” Celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, Amara is a leading luxury home retailer that everyone is talking about. We speak to Amara’s creators about its expert curation, its tabletop offerings and its rapid international expansion
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uxury home online retailer Amara has come a long way since its conception 10 years ago as an interior design business set up by husband and wife team, Andrew and Sam Hood. The combined strengths of the couple – Sam’s long career in retail fashion and Andrew’s 20 years as MD at Lehman Brothers – saw the business migrate into a shop on the stylish Baddow Road in Chelmsford, Essex, UK. Stocking the best in home accessories and carefully curated interior must-haves, the shop helped to initially build their client base and relationships with the world’s most coveted luxury brands. Spotting a gap in the online market for a distributor of luxury homewares, Andrew and Sam soon took an entrepreneurial leap of faith
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and created Amara.co.uk. The first big names in home fashion have been with Amara from the start, including Missoni Home and William Yeoward Crystal and from these, the couple continued to build this luxury homewares empire. Today, Amara houses more than 300 of the world’s most luxurious home fashion brands, from Roberto Cavalli to Missoni Home, with many of them exclusive to Amara, such as Ralph Lauren Home, a brand that carefully selected Amara as the only online store with which to distribute its home collections. Last year was a big one for Amara – not only did it increase its luxury product offering to nearly 30,000 and introduce more top brands, including Wedgwood, but it took its successful retail strategy to the next level with international expansion, rolling out websites to
cater specifically for more countries outside the UK. In addition to the Amara.co.uk website, the retailer now boasts dedicated sites for the US, Australia, New Zealand, the UAE, Canada, France and Ireland. Amara also launched the inaugural Interior Blog Awards last year – this proved a phenomenal success and the second one will run this year. However, Amara has also secured its own awards; in 2011 it picked up the Best Online Customer Service Award and both last year and this, it was awarded Feefo’s Gold Trusted Merchant award for providing consistently outstanding customer service. Its Wine & Dine sector includes everything from tea sets and serving bowls to napkin rings and dinnerware sets and delivers all the best tabletop brands, including
MacKenzie-Childs, Loveramics, Lenox, Wedgwood, Vista Alegre Alessi, Riedel, Waterford, Robbe & Berking, Seletti, Robert Welch, L’Objet, Tom Dixon, Sabre, Royal Delft and Juliska, to name a few. We speak to Amara founders, Sam and Andrew Hood.
You started out with a bricks and mortar store and now you are solely an e-commerce facility. Why this direction and what are the benefits? We ran both our online and our original boutique side by side at first, however we saw the growth online and decided to concentrate our efforts on the website. I always knew that the web business would be much bigger than a single store could ever be, but I didn’t realise you couldn’t have the website without