From Blank Canvas to 70,000 SKUs
When Paula joined Freedom in 2020, they were midway through launching their first proper ecommerce platform. The old system was a bespoke build off the point-of-sale. Fulfilment was manual. Endless aisle didn’t exist.
They launched on SAP Commerce in December 2020, partnering with Fluid and Shippit to bring fulfilment to life. What followed was five years of layering capabilities on top: Coveo for AI-powered search and personalisation, Adyen for payments, Impact for affiliate attribution, and a mixed-media modelling platform that now refreshes monthly across every channel, from TV to TikTok. Paula laughs about her first few months. Coming from a fashion background across Rebel Sport, Dan Murphy’s and General Pants, she thought furniture would be manageable.
“I’d drive home crying going, what have you done, this is insane.”
Paula Mitchell, Digital General Manager, Freedom
The category has wildly varied lead times, highly emotional purchase decisions, and a last mile that matters far more than in fashion. Her advice to anyone joining the business: give it six months before you start drawing conclusions.
Dropship Done Right
One of the bigger decisions Freedom made was expanding its catalogue through a dropship model rather than a marketplace. In a marketplace, third-party sellers manage their own fulfilment, returns, and customer service. In Freedom’s dropship model, they own it all.
“We didn’t want to hand off to someone else to solve a customer problem or deal with a return.”
Paula Mitchell, Digital General Manager, Freedom
Freedom has built brand trust over decades. A customer buying a third-party product through Freedom expects the Freedom experience. If the product needs to come back, they should be able to walk into a store. Returns for online-exclusive dropship products are accepted in-store, and Paula sees it as non-negotiable. “Nothing pisses anyone off more than turning up to a store and the store saying, ‘ Sorry, you’ve got to post that back to your online warehouse.”
AI That Actually Helped
Freedom now runs up to 30 ad variations per campaign through AI-assisted creative production. The team size hasn’t changed. What’s changed is how the team spends their time.
Before AI, testing four creative variants meant fighting for production resources. Now the same team tests 30 or 40, reads the signals the platforms send back, and doubles down on what’s working. The strategic thinking hasn’t been replaced. It’s been freed up.
“Before it was, I want to test these four variants, but I’ve got no resources to do it. Now I’m testing 30, 40, 50 variants. The team are pumped.”
Paula Mitchell, Digital General Manager, Freedom
The same logic runs across the catalogue. With more than 70,000 SKUs and a team of 12, AI-assisted content production and automated merchandising through Coveo have enabled scaling without proportional headcount growth. On attribution, Freedom recently implemented mixed-media modelling across all channels, which settled some long-running internal debates. TV, the data said, is not dead.
The Word That Needs to Go
Near the end of the conversation, Nathan raised something that’s been building for a while: whether “digital team” has become a legacy label. Paula agreed, more directly than expected.
“It’s not digital, it’s just retail. We’re just buying sh*t and selling sh*t on multiple channels.”
Paula Mitchell, Digital General Manager, Freedom
Her argument is that “digital” served a purpose when you needed a specialised team to bring the rest of the business on a journey, to prove people would buy sofas online, and to break down the internal resistance. That battle is won. At Freedom, online sales attributable to a store’s postcode flow directly to that store’s P&L. There’s no separate digital budget fighting for legitimacy. The teams are integrated because the customer never saw a separation in the first place.
What’s Next for Freedom
Paula is watching a kiosk trial across seven stores: big screens that let sales staff show the extended dropship catalogue and swap fabric options on a 32-inch display. She wants to know whether it builds purchase confidence and whether that confidence translates into purchases.
She’s also building toward an AI-driven inspiration mode on the website, something that learns what kind of space you’re furnishing and surfaces products in the right setting. A tan leather sofa looks different in front of a beach view than in a dark inner-city terrace. The goal is to put it in front of you in the context where you’d fall for it.
The through-line across all of it: faster is not the point. Doing what you say you’ll do, and making sure the customer feels confident enough to hand over money for a $10,000 sofa, is what actually wins.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does certainty matter more than fast delivery in furniture ecommerce? Furniture is a high-consideration, high-emotion purchase. Customers often wait weeks or months for made-to-order pieces. What they need is confidence that the item will arrive when promised, not necessarily that it arrives quickly. A missed delivery window on a $3,000 dining table damages brand trust in a way that a delayed fast-fashion order simply doesn’t.
What is the difference between dropship and marketplace in retail? In a marketplace model, third-party sellers manage their own fulfilment, returns, and customer service under a retailer’s platform. In a dropship model, the retailer owns the end-to-end customer experience, including last-mile delivery and returns, even for products sourced from third-party vendors. Freedom chose dropship over marketplace specifically to protect its brand experience and allow customers to return third-party products in-store.
How can ecommerce teams use AI to scale ad creative without growing headcount? AI-assisted creative tools allow teams to produce and test far more ad variations than traditional production workflows allow. Freedom uses this to run 30 or more variations per campaign with the same team size, feeding the signals back into their media strategy. The shift moves the team’s time from production to interpretation, which tends to improve both results and job satisfaction.
What is mixed media modeling and why are Australian retailers using it? Mixed media modelling (MMM) is a statistical approach that measures the revenue contribution of each marketing channel, including offline channels such as TV, radio, and outdoor, using independent data rather than platform-reported attribution. Freedom implemented MMM to resolve internal disagreements about budget allocation across digital and brand channels. The data showed that TV remains a meaningful driver of revenue, challenging the assumption that digital channels should account for the majority of spend.
Based on Episode 624 of the Add To Cart podcast with Paula Mitchell, Digital General Manager at Freedom. Join the Add To Cart community for free.
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