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23 January 2026
Meet the Wangaratta furniture business trading its way into a stellar position
Offering fast turnaround and keenly priced delivery has helped regional retailer McPhails supercharge its sales of imported furniture.
Casey and Taylor McPhail are second generation furniture merchants who took over the family store in Wangaratta in 2017.
Back then, sales were sluggish and profits negligible, despite the pair’s efforts to broaden their range and develop an online sales arm.
Then Covid struck and things changed fast for the struggling business.
Riding the renovation wave
Stuck at home in lockdown, Australians went into renovation mode, doing up their properties and scouring the internet for fashionable furniture and accessories.
Importing a huge volume of stock from suppliers in China and Vietnam early in the pandemic meant McPhails could come through with the goods – and offering contactless delivery within an 850km radius for just $59 clinched the deal for many customers.
“In April 2020 our monthly turnover went from $200,000 to $600,000,” Taylor says. “Up until then we’d been selling maybe 50 containers a year. But off the back of that lift, I ordered around 150 containers at once.
“By the time they arrived in July, many of our competitors who’d cancelled their orders back in March were struggling to get stock whereas our warehouse was full.”
As were dozens of temporary storage facilities in and around Wangaratta.
“Being local, we knew everyone who owned sheds,” Taylor says. “A lot of businesses didn’t have such a good time in Covid and we were able to take over leases or enter informal agreements to get the space we needed.”
Powering through the challenges
By September, monthly sales had hit the $1 million mark. In the meantime, McPhails’ contract haulier had announced it was unable to accommodate the increased volume of stock moving through the business.
That news prompted the brothers to bring their logistics inhouse.
“We bought our own truck and Casey and I got heavy vehicles licences so we could drive down to Melbourne to collect containers and drop orders to customers,” Taylor says.
“For two years, we both worked 100 hours a week, in the shop and on the road, doing whatever it took to keep the business moving in the right direction.”
Cementing the gains
That it has done, with a vengeance. Since 2022, McPhails has extended its showroom and invested $16 million in buying and building warehouses. It’s also spent up big on social media marketing, and on a fleet of 12 trucks.
The business now delivers everywhere from Adelaide to Bundaberg and to the greater Perth region.
And it provides steady work for 50 ‘Wang’ locals, including warehousing and logistics managers and up-and-coming web designers and marketeers.
Annual turnover reached $25 million in FY2025 – up from around $2million pre-Covid. But there’s still plenty of potential for growth, according to Taylor.
“We want to be at $100 million by 2030 but we may get there quicker,” he says.
Partnering with a bank that understands trade
NAB Senior Business Banking Manager Neil Membrey says timely access to trade and equipment finance allowed McPhails to take advantage of the opportunity to turn a small regional business into a national success story.
“By engaging a broad team of NAB specialists, including transactional and foreign exchange experts, we were able to support McPhails’ rapid growth while helping them protect their cash flow,” he says. “Working closely with Taylor and Casey to understand their strategy and exactly how their business model works has been key.”
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