TRADE WINS with Tara Solberg: Recent Episodes
Tara Solberg
Join Tara Solberg as she shares her personal journey on building her thriving furniture and homewares business ‘Few and Far’ from the ground up. Tara grew up on the South Coast of NSW Australia, and is a wife, mum, lifelong interiors addict, globetrotter and creative soul with an entrepreneurial spirit, salty hair and sandy toes. She has over 12 years of experience in the retail industry and has won a global award for ‘Innovation and Retail Excellence’, all from what started as a little store in Huskisson NSW. Each episode of the Trade Wins podcast contains a little piece of ‘gold’ that Tara wishes she had known when she was starting out in business all those years ago.
In this episode, your host Tara Solberg chats with Martin LoSurdo, Head of Business Sales and Aquisitions at MMJ about the questions to ask and what to look for when entering a commercial lease for your business.
Michelle Broadbent is a business strategist with a 20 year career as a trusted advisor to female entrepreneurs across an array of industries including media, fashion, design, travel, coaching, sales, training and recruitment. Michelle runs her own business transforming the businesses and the lives of their owners. She is the woman behind the woman - their sounding board and cheerleader and is passionate about seeing others succeed.
In this episode, your host Tara Solberg chats with Michelle about hiring the right people for your business. They talk about what to look for during the hiring process and how they've both managed to build a strong team. They talk about the pros and cons of listing budgets on job ads, how to talk salary during interviews and the red flags to look out for when you're hiring.
In this episode your host, Tara Solberg chats with Danny about their first trade fair and all the work involved including invoicing, packing and planning, and the excitement they felt over their first big wholesale order. They also talk about some of their best travel tips (like why to always eat the aeroplane food!) and how Danny almost got arrested in the airport.
In this episode, your host Tara Solberg chats with the owner and founder of Urban Rituelle, Leanne Haining. Leanne has a powerful vision to create a business that makes people feel good.
Her passion is to create a sustainable business with a philosophy of passion, kindness, care and unsurpassed quality. With more than 20 years’ experience in the gift & homewares industry, Leanne Haining is the creative force behind Urban Rituelle.
Leanne’s background in visual merchandising & business development, partnered with her creative flair, has steered Urban Rituelle from its early beginnings at Glebe markets, to being recognised as one of Australia’s leading manufacturers of bath, body, skincare & home fragrance products.
Urban Rituelle is now proudly stocked in 1000 boutique gift & homewares retailers Australia-wide as well as export markets including Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong & New Zealand. Leanne is a leader in creative concept design and product development, strategic planning and project management, marketing and brand building.
She has featured in publications such as Latte, The Collective, The Fashion Advocate and Better Homes & Gardens as well as speaking on panels with the womens networking group, Business Chicks and at various International Women’s Day events. Leanne’s skill set is a recipe of creativity, passion, determination & resilience, driven by a constant desire for growth & success, along with a love of travel & adventure, food & fine wine!
Career highlights include winning two categories in the International Beauty Shortlist Awards in 2021 as well as having Urban Rituelle products selected to make the Australian athletes feel at home in the Olympic village in Tokyo. Urban Rituelle has also been a regular winner of the GALA ‘Gift and Lifestyle Awards’ in 2008, 2014, 2015 & 2017 and Best Stand at the Reed Gift Fairs in 2000, 2011, 2016 & 2019. Urban Rituelle was a very proud Finalist in the Best New Product category at the New York International Gift Fair in 2010.
Leanne believes that beautiful things don’t just happen, if you want something marvellous, you have to make something marvellous!
In this episode your host, Tara Solberg has a chat with Danny about the challenges of importing from India and their experiences with suppliers during the first trips. They talk about the challenges of getting things home and how they began to wholesale.
In this episode your host, Tara Solberg chats with Danny about the lead-up to, and securing of, their first big business investment – the purchase of a little wooden cottage in Currambene Street Huskisson, that would become home to one of their retail stores. They also talk about the importance of thinking big when it comes to considering new ideas so that you don't stifle your potential.
One of the biggest questions I get asked is ‘What’s it like working with your husband?’, because let’s face it, I know a lot of people who immediately tell me that they couldn’t work with their partner, especially in such a close capacity, every. single. day.
In this episode, I sit down with my Husband Danny to chat about how we have navigated building a business as a married couple and why that has worked for us. While there have been challenges, there have also been some massive wins, but neither of us would have it any other way.
In this episode, I confess the mistakes and 'rookie errors' that Danny and I made in the early years of operating Few and Far. I talk about the importance of being organised ahead of the Christmas period and the things you may not have thought about when selling furniture!
One of the most important things about starting a business is not only knowing your 'why' but having a clear vision and plan on how to bring that to life. In this episode I chat with my husband Danny about how our five-year plan didn't quite go to plan.
We talk about the challenges of sending Danny on our first buying trip to China (solo!) and the hurdles we had to overcome sharing spaces with other businesses. We recall the difficulty and stresses faced when importing containers from a non-English-speaking country and give you some insight into the mistakes we have made along the way.
But, most importantly we discuss how to overcome all of the challenges we have faced to build a successful retail business.
One of the biggest hurdles we all face when starting a new business, and something that can quite often be the deciding factor as to whether or not we actually pursue our ideas or not is finance. I know when Danny and I started our business back in 2009, we didn’t have a lot of money, or access to money (and we didn’t know a lot about that side of it either!), and our business was built from a contribution of the entirety of our savings, from selling assets and from borrowing from the good old bank of Mum and Dad.
In this episode, I've invited the always inspiring Melissa Browne from @moremoneyforshoes to offer her advice on how to approach taking that ‘leap’ into going into business for yourself and making sure you’re taking the right steps to a successful (and profitable) outcome. You can find out more about what Mel offers here. Enjoy!
Want to dive further into the details of when we opened our first store? In this episode I talk about life before taking the leap and quitting my 9-5, getting engaged, finding our first store and dedicating every waking hour to building and bringing to life the vision that both Danny and I had.
In this episode I sit down with my husband and co-founder of Few and Far and Indigo Love, Danny Solberg to talk about where we grew up, how this has impacted our decisions, how we met and the trials and triumphs of coming together to start our business.
In this welcome message, Tara Solberg introduces her latest project, The TRADE WINS Podcast. The series features stories of her own personal experience of building her furniture and homewares business Few and Far into the multi million dollar brand it has become, as well as interviews with industry experts, creatives and makers that have inspired her along the way.