Elliot Moss
Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today, I am very pleased to say, is Jonathan Holmes, Founder and CEO of LuxDeco, the luxury interiors platform. Raised in a large entrepreneurial family, Jonathan’s focus on interiors developed while helping his mother source items for her design business – she’s now LuxDeco’s Interiors Director by the way. A self-proclaimed ardent support of luxury, it was Jonathan’s frustration with the uninspiring high-end interiors on the high street that drove him to create change. Combining his experience in and passion for digital technology and design, he sought to create a marketplace that would, as he says, “transform a local, offline, fragmented industry into a digitally connected ecosystem.” LuxDeco launched in 2012, offering design advice, installation support and an interior design studio service with expertise ranging from full service residential and hospitality projects to product sourcing and bespoke furniture design.
It’s lovely to have you here. Your relationship with luxury, Jonathan, what’s all that about then?
Jonathan Holmes
Firstly, thank you for having me and it’s great to be here. Yes, interesting. My relationship with luxury, I think probably started from an influence from my parents so, my mother’s always been an interior designer, as you mentioned in the intro, she works for us now as our Interiors Director so, I’ve spent my life surrounded by really nice objects, from my home growing up, everything in my life has always been quite nice, quite luxury, I’ve been very privileged in that sense that I’ve been around some sort of fantastic things that can inspire you to be into luxury and I think that’s carried on throughout my career and my whole early sort of childhood in terms of my schooling and then when I went to university, there’s a design and sort of inspirational aesthetic that follows through that. I studied art, I studied design at university so I think the aesthetics has always appealed to me and something that’s obviously very important in what I do today and I think really that’s shaped a lot of the decisions I’ve made in my career, even when I was working previous to LuxDeco, working in sort of design space helping other clients, it was always luxury clients that I went for, that was always what appealed to me and I think it’s just something that’s naturally been sort of embedded in me, which again comes from being quite privileged in my upbringing and so I think that’s something that I’ve always adapted to and enjoyed being around.
Elliot Moss
But luxury, you know, for me, for you, for you listening, everyone has their own version of it. I’m just interested in when you grew up, as you said, around aesthetically pleasing objects that were luxury in the way that they were brought to life. What is it? What’s that, is there an emotional relationship you have, which may sound a strange thing to say with an object but what is it about luxury that, you know what does it make you feel? That’s what I’m really interested in and I want to ask you about where LuxDeco came from.
Jonathan Holmes
Yeah, I think that’s very interesting. Luxury is one of those words that can be completely overused and it is overused, you’ll see a very low-end store selling something that says it’s luxury, it’s actually in most cases completely the opposite. And a lot of people also think it’s just around price and it’s not just around price, it’s not something that’s just expensive. For me, I always look at things that are very high quality, things that are beautiful, like I said, aesthetic, generally well made, they’re the sort of the qualities that always stand out for me and that’s something that we’ve applied to our range itself. It’s not just about being an expensive item, it is craftsmanship really that tells that story around luxury and has products that actually have a story to tell themselves.
Elliot Moss
So early days right, when you were little, because when I was little, my first memories of being very small was playing football with my dad, right, and we, it was, it was kind of not a luxury, it wasn’t a very luxury experience but it’s very, very powerful in my mind, that memory, going in the back garden, knocking the ball over the back about 58,000 times. For you though, do you remember when you were first, as a child, connected to this thing called luxury? Do you remember the object? Can you describe it, if that’s possible?
Jonathan Holmes
I think it’s hard to remember a specific object but I definitely remember being in a very nice environment and I think that was really where it came from and…
Elliot Moss
Soft carpet?
Jonathan Holmes
Soft carpet, nice objects…
Elliot Moss
Nice soft carpet.
Jonathan Holmes
Yeah, very soft carpet. Obviously, at the time, I probably didn’t really appreciate it as much as I do now looking back but you know the environment that we create in the home was always very nice to look at. In terms of memories around playing football and things, we didn’t do any of that. Our football in our family was business, like we still do that now, that’s all we do. Christmas dinner will eventually lead into a business conversation. We don’t do the sort of whole sport thing so, the memories of being at home and talking business have probably ended up what have shaped my career going forward and the decisions I’ve made but, yeah, I remember more the sort of feeling of being in a nice environment which, again, I don’t really feel connected to me until more recently and looking back than it did at the time but just felt like some great environments and some nice objects and you know, dad had a nice car and things like, some of those things that just I remember looking back now as being you know very nice to have at the time and they’ve sort of stuck with me. I like that feeling of being around nice things.
Elliot Moss
And LuxDeco, give me the quick headline, obviously we’re going to talk a lot more, tell me the inspiration for LuxDeco in 2021.
Jonathan Holmes
Yeah, so interestingly, I was working at the time in the same office as my mother so, previous to that, the financial crisis had hit my mother’s business quite hard, it had hit my family business on my father’s side very hard and my mother was trying to really look at how to I guess reinvent her business and we started sharing an office in sort of Essex and I was looking at what she was doing on a day-to-day or more overhearing what she was doing on a day-to-day part of her day working and I was trying to develop my own business, which was building more digital clients. You know, I’ve been in the sort business of building websites for people in some shape or form for a long time and I was trying to do my business while watching hers and I could just hear sort of conversations going on with customers that were around trying to find items, trying to find individual pieces they were looking for and how to find them and again, something that didn’t really completely click with me and at the time I was just paying attention to what was going on and looking at the industry and thinking this is still very old school, from the sounds of it. Now I’d also been throughout my life taken to loads of trade shows, generally as my mother’s driver, you know “Can you please take me to this trade show” here, there and I’d go and I’d see these products that were amazing and they was, you know, like I said beautiful, high quality and then when I actually moved to my own property and thought actually, my house is quite unique, it’s got a very different, it’s not your sort of standard building, it’s got exposed brick etc, I needed to find something that was just not off the shelf so, I couldn’t go to most of the local stores and find things that worked for my property so, obviously, naturally I kept having to say to my mum, can you find this for me, can you find this for me, can you find, and that really was a bit of a pain point for me and I was like this doesn’t make sense, why is it so difficult? And that was really what got me to look and think okay, there needs to be more access to these products and obviously the internet is a great thing to be able to give access to anything so, why is no one doing that? And then I sort of took a step back and thought, is there a business opportunity here? Is it something that we could develop? And I did two things, firstly, I started researching the market and then realised actually, this is a huge market, loads of potential, completely fragmented, the luxury segment of home is like £30, £40 billion market, which is bigger than watches, yet no one can name three or four brands that are in that space. So there was a, there was a sort of marker there that was okay, this is interesting, there’s a gap there but has no one done it because it’s not possible and it’s not practical and that’s generally what most people will say.
Elliot Moss
Those first steps to building LuxDeco, to say okay, I’m going to find a way of trawling the world, surfacing them digitally and then selling them, just tell me about those early, those early few days and months in making that actually a reality.
Jonathan Holmes
The first steps were really to actually see if there was any demand. So, I hacked together – and when I say ‘hacked’, I’ve got some coding skills but they’re not good – I hacked together a cart and added it onto my mum’s existing interior design website and then I just started running some Google ads to see will anyone ever checkout for a piece of furniture online, high-end furniture, and we had a few good relationships with suppliers that obviously my mother had worked with in the past and I just said can we test is and they was very receptive and said yeah, go ahead. So, we tested it and started adding some products on and we built a cart, run a few ads and then I kind of just left it for a while, for six months or so while I did other bits and bobs and obviously was checking in and optimising the ads etcetera and it just started to get a few sales and it was ticking over, it was doing okay so I was like, okay this quite bizarre, there’s no real effort going into actually growing this but people are checking out and buying stuff so…
Elliot Moss
What were they buying, Jonathan? Sorry to cut across you, what kind of things?
Jonathan Holmes
I think one of the first things we ever sold was a dining table and chairs, which was, which was a shock because it was quite a high ticket item that we wasn’t, you know that was up there as a bit of a showstopper, we didn’t think that would ever sell at the start. So, I started to get some insight that okay, this has actually got legs, like this could be a business and from that point, I started to build an actual, like everyone does, the normal business plan and started to go and speaking to a few investors to see if they was interested, speaking to a few brands about being interested and basically the initial sort of flat out story was absolutely not, no one’s ever going to buy your furniture on the internet, we don’t want to have products on the internet, it’s not going to work and I heard that repeatedly over and over and over again, which to me was like great, this is a good idea because I want to disrupt this market and everyone is saying the things I think they were going to say. My view was also though, hold on, most of furniture is bought through distant sell anyway, even if you go into a store and you see a sofa and you say I would like it in a different colour, you don’t walk out with it in a different colour that day, you’re taking the punt that you’ve seen it and you, okay you get to sit on it, slightly different, but you are still ordering it in a different colour that’s probably come from some kind of catalogue or a salesperson showing you different fabric swatches and loads of businesses have been built in history, in furniture space, from catalogues so, for me it was okay, the distance selling thing works but everyone just doesn’t really buy into the fact that it will be the internet and then obviously, the comfort question comes up a lot and that’s something you always have to look into but there was just this whole view that it’s just not going to work.
Elliot Moss
On the comfort thing though, just out of interest, you know, you look at designer objects, especially chairs and sofas and the truth is, they’re beautiful pieces, they’re literally objects of art, so I mean, you know, we all talk about the comfort thing but who knows whether you know you sit down in the sofa shop and you go is that comfortable, dunno, I mean, I guess you look back now and you go crazy, of course people should have believed that this was going to work because, in reality, you rarely think with your head when you are buying a designer piece of furniture, I mean this is not a rational decision is it…
Jonathan Holmes
No. Absolutely not.
Elliot Moss
…to spend two thousand quid on four legs and a… of course by the way, I love luxury, I’m not being pejorative at all about the world of luxury but there is a different way of looking at a chair which is from a famous design house and all that. But you ignored them, which is interesting. At what point did those people that didn’t believe you, at what point did they get on and start saying you know what, I am behind this? Has that been more recently and if so, how recently?
Jonathan Holmes
It was interesting, in terms of the first step obviously was you know understanding that this is going to take quite a bit of capital to get this business live, that was a, that was an obvious view and every business shaper you have on here probably has the same discussion, they need to scout out business and they’ll need some capital to do so. So, I knew that I had to raise money somehow and convince some investors and it was a bit of a twist of fate that actually secured the first part of investment, I was actually helping a business with their digital, not far from here actually, in Golden Square, and I was working with those at the time and just had a few random sort of watercooler conversations that were like I’m helping you at the moment but I’m going to do my own business and the investor is someone you’ve actually had on the show, Robin Tombs from Yoti.
Elliot Moss
Oh yeah.
Jonathan Holmes
He was the guy I was working with and I was discussing with him the potential and he wanted me to stay there and do some work on his project and I said I would love to but I’ve got to leave, I’m doing my own thing and we had a few conversations about what that was and I was explaining LuxDeco and he liked the idea and then, you know, that was just a conversation but a few sort of random things happened. I went to the doctors one day and he was there and then we discussed it a bit more and then one day I’d had an investor meeting that went really badly and got on the train and I sat next to him and he said where have you been today and I said an investor meeting and we had a conversation about investing and these conversations started to develop and then he ended up writing the first cheque and that was really what got the business going, which was just a strange twist of fate that it actually worked in a great way. He’s been my main investor right the way through with his partner, Noel Hayden, they’re the biggest investors we have in the business and we are in a unique position where we’ve raised significant capital from just angels. We’ve had no VC funding, it’s all been from angel investors and that’s been quite unique that they have backed it all the way through so it, the business could never have been formed without that investment, it needs to come from there and I think there was just a I think when I speak to him now and discuss it with him, we’ve got a good relationship, it was the sort of the passion and the drive for it which he invested in me ultimately and I think that’s the case with a lot of startups, he said ‘look, I think you’re going to do something good with it so I’ll back’ and that’s really how it started but then from there on, the real business had to come along, it was actually convincing the brands and the employees etcetera, that was really where the big challenge was and I think most people look at fundraising as sort of the big milestones but in reality, that’s par for the course but actually, it’s building the business that’s the challenge.
Elliot Moss
The real substance of the business. You’re going to find out much more about that from my Business Shaper later here on Jazz Shapers, that’s Jonathan Holmes, he’ll be back in a couple of minutes to talk about LuxDeco and beyond the serendipitous nature of bumping into Robin Tombs about eighteen times. Right now though, it’s time to hear a taster from the Mishcon Innovation Series and they can be found on all of the major podcast platforms. The fabulous Natasha Knight invites business founders to share their industry insights and practical advice for those of you thinking about getting into an industry and starting your very own thing, like Jonathan. In this clip, focussed on retail, we hear from Taymoor Atighetchi, Founder and CEO of Papier, an online stationery brand.
All our former Business Shapers await you on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can, of course, hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice. My guest today is Jonathan Holmes, Founder and CEO of LuxDeco, the luxury interiors platform. The last few years you’ve grown, the naysayers were proved wrong and here we are in a world where selling a £2,000 or a £3,000 sofa and a £400 beautiful chair, well actually more like £1,300 by the looks of things as I last peeped on your website, it’s all very normal so, plain sailing, right, Jon? You’ve, you’ve cracked it. Nothing else to do now.
Jonathan Holmes
I would love it if that was the case but sadly, sadly not. I think there’s been some huge shift in the whole perception of digital and obviously that was primarily driven by Covid, where people did start to shop online and I think the conversations that we used to have with brands when we first started to say you know, you should be online, has now switched to please can we get on your platform and there’s been a big shift in that, which has been great and that’s been also mirrored by the fact that you know so many mor people investing in their home and trying to make their homes more beautiful and that obviously drove us to really increase our growth in the year that everyone was stuck inside. Now obviously…
Elliot Moss
A 119% up.
Jonathan Holmes
Yes, exactly. So…
Elliot Moss
According to my statistics in front of me.
Jonathan Holmes
So, some big growth there and actually interestingly in 2021, we still grew again, where a lot of people hit a peak and then sort of dropped back down again, we just carried on, carried on growing.
Elliot Moss
So, what’s driving the growth, Jonathan? What do you think?
Jonathan Holmes
Ultimately, one of the best things about this business is that there is a rising tide in terms of e-commerce adoption in our space, you know, we’ve always been excited by the fact that home is really four, five years, maybe more, behind where fashion is in terms of digital adoption, so we know we’ve got that you know wave to ride, which is great but ultimately, it’s probably investment adjusting to our range, into our customer experience and actually making the shopping experience as effortless as possible and that’s what we, what we try to do and it’s what we do every day and there’s still a long way to go to make that happen.
Elliot Moss
Let me just ask though, very quickly, on the aesthetic piece, we started with your relationship with luxury, how hands on are you in curating what sits on your website or is that now a delegated task? Is that your mum?
Jonathan Holmes
No, it’s not, my mum actually did quite a lot of it in the early stages. I still keep a good eye on it but we have a team that works on that now and they’re looking at products from brands, new one, new artisans or existing brands from around the world, so they’re on that full-time.
Elliot Moss
And do you get excited still when you see a gorgeous piece or are you truthfully more interested in making the mechanics of the thing work, the application of data science I’ve read about? Which bit, for you, is the buzziest? Truthfully.
Jonathan Holmes
I still love seeing the products and I still will go and review what we’re looking at and I’ll still make some key decisions if I think something should be built and something not but I do love the mechanics of the business. I think the growth is the thing that excites me the most, the growth and how we can take it to a bigger market, how we can simplify that customer experience. They’re the things that excite me because there’s so much left to do, you know, a home is an industry where no one shouts about how great the experience was. No one goes shopping in a furniture store and comes back and says that was the best day of my life. It’s a bad experience generally and the fact that we believe technology can change that, is what drives me every day and there’s a lot to do and I think the downside to the scale we got in the Covid period was actually the supply chain, as with every business at the moment, wasn’t matching up to the demand so, trying to get those two to level up is actually probably where a lot of the focus is at the moment, yeah. Ultimately, we’ve got to move expensive products, that are prone to damage, from all over the globe, seamlessly. And that is a big challenge on its own, just operationally, to then make sure a customer receives it and is happy. So, there’s so much to look at that you can’t not be excited by that part but at the same time, I’ll still you know read customer feedback, I’ll still go look at all the products we’ve got on the site, I’ll still put my nose into places where I probably shouldn’t and annoy my team because I still like a lot of the other aspects as well, I generally do keep an eye on most aspects of the business because I’m passionate about.
Elliot Moss
The team. You’ve built a team of around 80 people, that’s not a small number anymore, I’m sure you know everybody by name and the names of their families, if they have them, and their dogs and most people seem to have dogs now, post-Covid. What would they say about you when you are not in the room?
Jonathan Holmes
Oh, interesting question. Probably something I can’t say on air but I think overall, I think they’ll probably say that I’m very clear in trying to articulate where we’re going in the vision, or at least in the future, maybe not so much the short-term goals but definitely the long-term of where I want this business to go. And probably to follow along with that, it would be that I’m quite relentless, you know if there’s something I want to get fixed, I’ll keep on and on and on. and I definitely think they’ll say resilient because this business, as with any business, has had a lot of ups and downs, there’s been times where it’s been you know hard and then challenging both for myself or the team for anyone around, you know, my family etcetera but it’s never really put me off and I think there’s, and I’ve learnt that from, from you know my family and how being around a lot of entrepreneurs in my life that that is something that is part of being an entrepreneur, you have to be able to you know take notice when people say you won’t sell online, this business won’t work, you have to be able to look at problems and try and navigate them and I think that’s really where it’s a tolerance to stress and a skillset that you know it’s not always the best one to talk about because you don’t want to go through those scenarios but it’s something that’s very important.
Elliot Moss
No, but it’s, it’s, and it’s what you said at the beginning which is like you know you were just around conversations which were about business, as was I actually because both my parents were entrepreneurs and it does, you are right, you are just, you are just imbued in it, it’s just part of what you do. Do you still talk to family a lot about the business and if so, is it just to reassure you or there sometimes really difficult problems that you want to mull over with someone that you know you can trust?
Jonathan Holmes
I think I talk to my family, especially my dad in particular, about business every time we talk, you know, we sat on holiday once and said let’s just not talk about business for a few hours because it’s all we ever talk about and all we’ve ever talked about and within two minutes, we were just sort of staring at each other blankly to say, we don’t really have anything else to talk about so let’s just carry on talking about business, that’s just what we do so I think it works in two ways, he’ll talk to me about problems he’s got, I’ll talk about problems I’ve got and just different perspectives, as with any conversation you have with people can sometimes make you think of something different and I think listening to other people’s ideas is something that helps you be more successful, helps you navigate these problems, you know, especially as a single founder, you know, you don’t have someone to bounce off every day, I’ve got a great team around me that I can but there’s always some things where you might just want a different opinion or someone who looks at it in a very different way and obviously, you know my dad’s a lot older than I am, he looks at business in a very different way to what I do and actually sometimes the middle is actually a really good solution so, yes, we talk about it all the time and now I’ve got a younger brother, he’s twenty three, he’s joined in the conversation as well so, we’re all just constantly talking about it, which sounds quite boring but we enjoy it.
Elliot Moss
No. No, what a noise in the Holmes’ household, I tell you. Final chat coming up with Jonathan Holmes, my Business Shaper today and there’s something special from Ray Charles as well, just around the corner, so don’t go anywhere.
Jonathan Holmes is my Business Shaper just for a few more minutes, he’s the Founder of LuxDeco if you haven’t picked that up already. We were talking about family and what happens when you talk about business and indeed that’s what you, you as you said comfortably, you all talk about. Doesn’t it get emotional, Jonathan? I mean, you know, family businesses are very, and they’re very common and I meet lots of people who are in business with their family or have family in the background, and it strikes me that obviously there’s a, they’ve got your back thing because you know it's family and they’re there for you but there’s another thing about just reverting to type. You’re the kid, he’s the dad or she’s the mum, there’s a younger brother, do you avoid the emotion or is there lots of emotion?
Jonathan Holmes
We’re quite emotional people so, it’s quite hard to avoid it. Sometimes those conversations turn into fireworks and I think that’s, I think a lot of entrepreneurs will have a lot of passion and they’ll defend their ideas, I think no one likes criticism, you have to take ideas from that criticism but no one really actually loves hearing it, no matter how much they say like hearing criticism, no one really does. So, yes, there’s absolutely some emotional parts in there and there is always that fact that you know, dad will always say you’re my son, I’m right and that leads to a lot of tension and when I worked the other side, when I actually did spend a few years of my career working for my dad’s business, I found that extremely difficult and I couldn’t do that and that was, that was too hard. So, we try and still, we have a lot of conversations but at a distance. Having my mother working in the business is very different, we’re in separate teams effectively anyway. She works in the interior design studio, I work much more with the sort of website side of the business so, I don’t have that sort of same conversation with her, our conversations will be all about what products there are and the industry more than actual hard business conversations. So I do think that there is, it’s hard to avoid any emotional conversation when you’re talking with family than business but the fact that I will either be advising on his business and he’s advising on mine, does sort of also mean that there’s no line of responsibility, a line of hierarchy anywhere and you can talk as peers and that makes it a lot easier.
Elliot Moss
But it sounds also like just looking at the way you talked about that, there’s the fireworks isn’t necessarily bad, you kind of like it, you like a bit of a, I imagine you like a safe fight rather than an unsafe fight and when you are with family, you can have a safe fight.
Jonathan Holmes
Yeah, for sure and I actually say to my leadership team quite a lot, like we don’t argue enough and I know that sounds quite odd but sometimes those, those conversations, you do end up thrashing things out, getting to the place you need to be and yeah, I do, I mean I actually sometimes when the business is in it’s most strange position is when I’m most excited and you know that’s when I’ll go okay and I’ll be up at four in the morning and I’ll be at the office. They’re the bits I do enjoy.
Elliot Moss
Do you want them to say not to you more, Jonathan, is that what you are saying here on Jazz Shapers? Are they going to take this back and go, good, I can argue more with him? But joking aside, is that, is that true? Do you want more challenge?
Jonathan Holmes
Look, I think any challenge is good and most of the decisions that get made in the business aren’t necessarily me saying that’s what you’re doing, you know the team are there to make the decisions, I hire people that are meant to be smarter than me in certain areas, that’s how I like to build the business and I think that they should be able to come and say this is wrong, as long as they’re in line with the vision and where we want the business to go. I’m definitely not a micro manager, I like to say to the team that’s where we’re going and it’s up to you how you get there, you can make your own call, I want you to be an entrepreneur, it’s one of our core values. Be an entrepreneur, figure it out and that means you’ve also got to have that resilience, you’ve also got to have that need to be able to argue your point, you’ve also got to fight for things and that’s what I’d like my team to be so, absolutely, you know I love to be challenged and it’s what really pushes me forward.
Elliot Moss
It’s been great talking to you. Your team are now going to feel even more empowered to go challenge you.
Jonathan Holmes
I hope so.
Elliot Moss
Thank you so much for being with me today. Just before I let you disappear, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Jonathan Holmes
My song choice is Summer In The City by Quincy Jones. Big Quincy Jones fan. Sadly, predominantly because I absolutely was obsessed with the Michael Jackson Thriller album when I was a kid. I used to dress up in some questionable outfits that should never, ever be seen and I really hope I’ve got no pictures of them circulating anywhere in the world. So that is why I really sort of looked at that artist but that song, we’re based in the city of London, summer in the city of London is a good place to be, a place a lot of people enjoy so it just resonated with me.
Elliot Moss
Quincy Jones with Summer in the City, the song choice of my Business Shaper, Jonathan Holmes. He talked about fireworks in a family-run business. When you’ve got people in the family that are also in the business, there are going to be fireworks but that isn’t necessarily a negative thing at all. He talked about wanting to be challenged and how important that is to have people around you, as we’ve said before, that do challenge you and that have got ideas and that are there because they are smarter than you in certain ways. And he talked about wanting everyone in his business to be an entrepreneur. How often have we heard that? Critical though if you are building something, you need everybody to behave as if it’s their money and it’s their business. Great stuff. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds of more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to Mishcon.com/JazzShapers.