Within the sea of entrepreneurship, finding your personal course can often feel like sailing against the wind. Mischa Couvrette, founding father of furniture and lighting company Hollis + Morris, knows this all too well.
Mischa took an unconventional path to becoming a designer. He studied marine biology and environmental science in university before embarking on a sailing journey that might perpetually change his profession trajectory.
Mischa and a few friends bought a sailboat, fixed it up, and sailed from Toronto to Guatemala. “It was this big project that made the even larger project of beginning a company feel that much easier,” he says.
Inspired by the constructing process, Mischa returned to Canada—and to highschool—to learn design before launching his furniture and lighting brand. He says the important thing to getting off the bottom was following the footsteps of other corporations. “I actually just checked out some brands that I admired and was similar to, ‘Yeah, how do I get there?’” he says.
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Developing confidence in design
One in every of Mischa’s first big breaks got here from making a connection at a trade show, where he was offered a window at Klaus, a premier furniture showroom in Toronto. That helped give him the arrogance to proceed honing his aesthetic, which embraced elements of nature. “I just got increasingly more comfortable and felt like I had a very keen eye for what people liked,” he says.
Mischa realized, though, that selling furniture in brick-and-mortar stores had its limitations. Hollis + Morris was often competing with more established furniture brands, and the stores’ sales representatives didn’t know his brand.
That’s when Mischa decided to begin selling on to interior designers and other professionals within the industry. He flew to Recent York and San Francisco to pitch architecture and interior design firms. Mischa says within the early days, the firms appreciated that he took the time as a designer to point out his work, as a substitute of pitching through salespeople.
Rethinking the B2B model
A majority of Hollis + Morris’ revenue comes from B2B sales. The brand works with firms which have big corporate clients like Equinox, Netflix, and Google.
In doing so, Mischa broke from the normal business model by offering price transparency. In retail and B2B sales, furniture prices were often hidden. “We just decided at one point, ‘You realize what? We will go alone. We’ll put our prices online,’” Mischa says, motivated by his experience of entering the sector as an outsider. Within the years since, Mischa has seen other brands follow suit, especially because the industry undergoes a metamorphosis.
Committing to sustainability
One theme throughout Mischa’s profession has been his concern for environmental impact. It’s what first attracted him to the sciences and now drives how Hollis + Morris operates and scales. The products are made locally in Toronto using locally sourced materials. Mischa is wary of greenwashing, but he says the corporate does what it may, even by way of designing products. “The goal is that the product lasts longer than any certainly one of us,” Mischa says.
To learn more about Mischa’s journey from renovating a sailboat to launching a furniture and lighting company, take heed to the full interview on Shopify Masters.
