How Incy Interiors grew internationally
“I love PayPal! I hate when I go to a website checkout and there’s no PayPal option. I’ve got to get my wallet out of my handbag and remember my credit card and type it in… It didn’t cross my mind to use anything else for my business.”
Her passion for her imagined brand was strong and Kristy threw herself in head first. Having researched a large number of manufacturers, she chose two and would sketch her ideas with rough estimates of the dimensions - initially just for children’s bedroom furniture.
“I had no idea what I was doing. We put in rough drawings and go back and forth with the manufacturers. The design and range is something we all do as a team. There are eight of us and we listen to each other and flick ideas around.”
Finding out that she was pregnant for the second time the week before she launched the company was a surprise and she’d given up a well-paying corporate career to “move furniture around, nine months pregnant”.
After the launch of Incy Interiors the brand increased organically to include adult ranges - Kristy lost count of the numbers of times she’d hear “I wish you did that in my size” - and while there are 120 stockists in Australia including Domayne and Freedom, the brand is also now available in eight countries, including the US.
“I received an email one day that said PayPal Working Capital would like to loan me $20,000 and within a few clicks it was in my PayPal account. We definitely relied on this loan to fund our expansion into the US.”
Initially the company used its website as its main shop front but social media and mobile have been hugely instrumental in the brand’s growth with some products selling out within 10 minutes of being posted on Facebook.
Today, 82 per cent of sales are made on mobile, which also backs up PayPal’s useful one-click approach to online shopping.
As you have to have a PayPal account to qualify for a PayPal Working Capital loan it’s also extremely easy to repay it through the same system: you agree on terms that suit your needs and then repay straight through your transactions.
“That’s a really cool thing about the Working Capital - the payments come out when you receive a payment, so when we sell a bed we receive 70% of that payment and 30% goes towards the loan.”
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