The Case Study below is reprinted from our September 2008 Newsletter. Since then, Urban have gone from strength to strength, experiencing a 250% growth in less than 3 years, even through the 2009 GFC.  - Kurt Schubert, February 2010.

Gary Allan’s currently a bit stressed and tired. He’s in the process of getting all the company’s current jobs out the door over the next few weeks before Urban shuts down its Archerfield workshop to move to a much larger manufacturing facility at Yatala. “It’s a big move,” he says. It’s also a necessary one. Urban’s grown at a steady rate in the last year or so, and they’ve been losing productivity because they’ve simply outgrown the premises they’ve worked out of for the last decade. Gary runs Urban Fountains and Furniture with his wife Claire – they design and manufacture street and outdoor furniture for a range of commercial and governmental projects Australia-wide.

They couldn’t afford an expensive sales rep that may or may not pay off so we engineered a set of solutions that would take a rep’s place for a fraction of the cost. We freshened up their logo and colour scheme to something more suited to the tastes and expectations of the architects, builders and specifiers that we needed to target. Among other things, we completely rebuilt the website and developed specification sheets that could be easily downloaded by specifiers. “Those things have saved me so much time. I get a lot less phone calls with people wanting details that we would then have to manually send them,” Claire relates.

With these materials in place, Urban and Ronin set out to push the brand and indeed the company, into the next stage of growth. Using a targeted e-marketing approach, to date Urban have been able to successfully network and introduce themselves to over 2500 architects, builders, construction managers and specifiers across Australia. This approach has resulted in an average of 700 visits a week on Urban’s website. Their latest catalogue was voluntarily downloaded by their target market over 6,000 times in the last month. It’s also meant huge changes to their bottom line.

On the back of the marketing systems and materials Ronin have implemented, Urban’s turnover has more than doubled from the previous financial year. Recent monthly figures indicate that it has tripled since the twelve months previously.

“Plus it’s not just that we’ve got more work. It’s better work. Whereas before we’d been tending to deal with the same smallish group of local councils and developers, now we’re shipping much more work to all over Australia,” notes Gary. “They’re the kind of projects that we want.” In fact, everyone in streets and parks from Townsville to the Gold Coast to Lane Cove are enjoying Urban’s furniture. “Working with Kurt has been a great experience that we have enjoyed,” says Claire. “It’s great to know we don’t need to worry about the marketing. We’re very pleased. The experience has been nothing but positive.”

Now Gary’s main concern is the move. “Moving is a stressful time but it is sign that things are really going well and too much work is a nice problem to have... and we have Kurt to thank for that. Now if only he had a moving van.....”