Kukoon Rugs plans to open five new shops in Ireland next year

Kukoon Rugs, a Newry based rug company, plans to open four to five retail shops in Ireland to expand its business in the Republic.

The plans include a seven figure investment that also will finance brand awareness campaigns and marketing efforts.

The company started as a purely online based rug shop in 2017 before opening its two shops, Newry in 2013, and Belfast in 2017.

Siblings Clare Walsh, managing director, and Paul Vallely, chief executive officer, founded the businesses in their parents’ home and it has since grown to become Ireland’s largest rug business, with over 2,000 rugs shipped daily to 60 countries.

Despite their focus on online sales, the company wants to establish a physical presence across Ireland and especially in the Dublin area.

“I know it is maybe a bit counter-intuitive, but I believe brick and mortar shops are not dead,” Walsh said. “However, 95 per cent of our business is online, so if we want a new retail presence in Ireland, we have to open four to five stores for it to make sense.”

She added that most shoppers research online but still want to see the products in a physical store.

“We receive a lot of questions if we a have a store in Dublin,” Walsh said. “We are confident that the demand is there. A challenge will be to find suitable locations.”

The decision to open up more stores was inspired by the near-destruction of Kukoon’s first store.

“The flood in November basically wiped out our first store in Newry with water rising two to three feet high,” Walsh said. “In the following days we had 50 people wanting to visit the store every day so we decided to set up an interim shop in The Quays Shopping Centre in Newry.”

Within six days of the flood, Kukoon managed to open up its new store. “My brother and I always thought of retails stores as slow in development and cumbersome, but this experience made us push on with more stores,” Walsh added.

My brother and I had a natural interest in business as our father was a market trader

The two siblings started Kuckoon by selling their father’s carpets on eBay in 2007.

“My brother and I had a natural interest in business as our father was a market trader,” Walsh said. “We always knew that we wanted to work for ourselves and we were intrigued by the upcoming online market.”

In the first year of their business, Walsh and Vallely sold carpets from local shops but quickly ran into scaling problems. “We had problems with the supply, because we only had a limited amount of the products we presented on our website,” Walsh said.

Their first shipment of their products was ordered from a supplier in Belgium and the company then started to grow “completely organically,” according to Walsh.

As Walsh and Vallely were only 19 and 23 at the time, they decided to move back into their parents home after graduating from college to fully concentrate on their business.

“At the start we sent every order from our local post office,” Walsh said. “We then grew slowly grew our staff by filling more and more skill gaps.”

Rugs as a design piece

Kukoon has a staff count of 48, including an own design department that creates patterns and new ideas for their rugs.

“The design demand has changed over the last few years,” Walsh said. “People are starting to get braver again with the colours.”

Previous trends were all very uniform and grey, Walsh added. “Now people seeing rugs more as a design piece and we can explore new avenues on the back of that.”

Kukoon has started to work with regional designers and artists to create a whole suite of new designs.

“Every one of these artists is so talented and we give them the chance to show this talent and monetise it,” Walsh said. “We wanted to refocus on our Irish home market and the collaboration helps us to achieve that while bringing attention to all the interesting stories of the artists.”

Apart from the expansion of the store network, Kukoon also hopes to widen a niche that has been neglected.

“I would love to establish an event that is completely focused on the homeware market,” Walsh said. “At the moment there are all these events that are either very sale focused or on home building rather than design.”

She said she hoped to establish an event focused on new trends in colours, materials and designs. “We are looking into that, but before that happens we want to work on our brand awareness and our Ireland expansion.”