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INSIGHT
A LEAGUE OF ITS OWN MLILY may be a star player in the global bedding industry, but what does it have in store for the UK marketplace as the impact of Covid-19 subsides? This month, global sales director Bob Badman talks to Furniture News about new products, business strategy, and the brand’s enduring partnership with Manchester United Football Club … www.mlily.uk
WE’RE AN ELITE SLEEP COMPANY, JUST AS MANCHESTER UNITED ARE AN ELITE FOOTBALL CLUB
Can you give us an idea of the range of projects you’re working on? As I am sure you can appreciate, with a company the size of MLILY there are always projects ongoing – many of which are covered by NDAs. However, I can say that as well as ongoing product development, we are continually working with various partners to strengthen their MLILY offerings, and it is this dedication to individual customers that has seen us strengthen our presence in the UK and Ireland every year since our first show in January 2014. How has the business fared during the past 15 months? The business has continued to go from strength to strength, despite the challenges of the pandemic. The launch of the new Premier collection just before the pandemic took hold proved such a success – even though many of our key customers have been closed for months on end, we achieved significant growth last year, and we are confident of doing the same again this year. We’ve also backed up the Premier
collection with a new range of pillows and a topper to further extend our offering, and we have also begun to look seriously at our approach to gaining more business online, with the launch of an ‘internet collection’ that has a different story to our core Premier product but still has that MLILY quality and story that enables consumers to make simple selections, and retailers/ etailers to make margin on a quality, trouble-free product. As well as further strengthening our relationships with our key customers, we’ve started to work with a number of key internet accounts, and are looking to build our internet business in the same way that we built our bricks-and-mortar partnerships – through support, and developing exclusive product for sale instore and online to make sure our brand isn’t devalued. In summary, we’ve tackled the issues by continuing to do everything we can to support our customers – including ramping up stockholding in order to ensure we maximise sales during the periods we have been able to trade.
