It's Not Digital, It's Just Retail with Freedom's Paula Mitchell | #624 — Add To Cart: Australia’s eCommerce Show

The whole ecommerce industry is racing to ship faster. Paula Mitchell thinks that's the wrong race.

Paula came to that view the hard way. After building ecommerce at Rebel Sport, Dan Murphy's and General Pants across 25 years, she joined Freedom as Digital GM and spent the first few months driving home wondering what she'd walked into. Furniture is not fashion. Made-to-order lead times run 12 to 16 weeks. Customers plan their lives around delivery windows. A $10,000 sofa carries emotional weight that a $70 t-shirt just doesn't.

Five years in, Paula is running one of the most-awarded omnichannel operations in Australia: 50 stores, six distribution centres, 160 third-party vendors, 70,000 SKUs, and a digital team of 12. Nathan Bush and Rosa-Clare Willis sit down with Paula to dig into why the industry's fixation on speed misses what furniture customers actually need, and how Freedom built the stack and team culture to move fast without losing brand trust.

Today, we're discussing:

Why certainty beats speed in high-consideration ecommerce, and what last-mile delivery in big-ticket categories actually demands [10:15]
How Freedom chose dropship over marketplace to protect brand trust, and why that meant owning returns in-store for third-party products too [14:47]
Running 30-plus ad variations per campaign with the same team size, and what AI actually changed about how Freedom's performance marketers spend their time [29:44]
Attribution across omnichannel: why last-click would have defunded every social channel, and what mixed media modelling revealed about TV [35:55]
A digital team of 12 managing 70,000 SKUs, how they're structured, and why Paula thinks the job title itself might be a legacy item [47:46]
What's next: a kiosk trial across 7 stores, an AI-driven inspiration mode for the website, and the feature Freedom just decommissioned [55:22]

Connect with Paula | Explore Freedom | Connect with Rosa-Clare | Connect with Nathan

This episode is supported by Shopify and Klaviyo.

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