The Mulbury Story - Video
Watch our interview with owner and founder - Gerry Melder
Questions answered in this video:
0:00 - Intro
0:18 - Why did you decide to make picture frames?
1:32 - What is Mulbury's purpose?
2:01 - How does Mulbury define success?
2:31 - Who is your ideal customer?
3:05 - What quality can we expect from Mulbury?
3:44 - Where did the name Mulbury come from?
4:40 - What's in store for the future of Mulbury?
Our Purpose:
Mulbury is committed to helping the world become more beautiful and sustainable by using recycled materials to make stunning and unique picture frames.
Our Values:
Ethical - Caring - Creative - Tenacious - Sustainable
Our Promise to you:
With over 25 years of experience, we promise the quality of our picture frames and homeware will meet and exceed your expectations.
Transcript from video:
Well i've always had a passion for timber architecture, art, industrial design and it's basically a natural progression and also we still had a lot of timber offcuts when we made our furniture.
We had to find another purpose for this timber rather than just throwing out
the offcuts, that's why we started making smaller picture frames. How do we market this? How did we sell this? Back in the day we just go to the markets on a weekend on a saturday and a sunday and we just road test them there and
the picture frames were an instant hit.
Then we realised that was a niche market that was really lacking no one was making any of this and there we met some amazing people who actually cared
about the environment. The passion for beautiful australian hardwood and everything else and it was just an instant hit and it was just so good to
be able to get involved and markets are really a leveler because you know you you'd go on a saturday and you'd have an amazing day and you go on the sunday you just you sell hardly anything so we constantly have to adjust and the markets,
doing the markets taught us a lot and today we are where we are because of those markets.
Well our main aim is to reduce landfill and only and only use recycled materials like timber, concrete, whatever we need to do. That's what we need to use,
just reduce landfill and recycle material always.
Sustainability is head and shoulders above everything else, the most important thing to us and we try, not try but we do source all our all our materials in an ethical way.
Well success to us is measured by the amount of timber that we save from going to landfill. Look you know we use our offcuts to make furniture
just go on our website and have a look at what we do and we're always looking to improve and you know, really use up everything that we can including our sawdust our sawdust are given to hand it out to chicken farmers, mushroom farmers, landscapers. So we basically use everything that we have.
Well so i think the the first thing we always do is we listen to what the customer wants. We don't try and uh try and sell them anything we basically listen to what what they want and most of them want us to use recycled timbers for their picture frames and they do understand that every frame we make is completely different
to each other. So they're the customers that we seem to attract and we seem to go hand in hand with them.
Well we strive to only supply top quality products and using recycled timbers. Sometimes it's not the easiest to do but with our experience over the years we have fine-tuned a lot of things and we're still learning and we'll be forever learning. So basically we need to make sure that we take time and patience to get
our quality right the way we want it, because if we're not happy nothing gets sent out we have to be happy with it first before anything goes out
Oh look when i was, when i was an apprentice carpenter there was an old guy um charlie who took me under his wing for some reason he liked me and i learned so much from him about life, about timber, about work ethics and just about you know everything in general he was an amazing guy.
He was such a mentor and an inspiration to me and he always said don't you ever ever work for the man, you got to run your own business, you got to be, you got to be passionate, you're passionate enough about timber so you got to be in your own business and when you do start your own business i want you to call it mulberry, and i said oh really why is that? And he goes well mulberry is the fruit
of your labor and i thought, oh that's pretty corny but anyway so we searched for the word mulberry we couldn't get it so the closest i could get was Mulbury, that's all in honor of charlie.
Well the future is really exciting for us because we're going to continue to source timber, recycled timber, recycled concrete recycled plastic and any other materials that we can look at and introduce into our fold. Sourcing these materials is basically a constant battle you know it's a it's a titanic struggle really but we will never ever give up because why? Because we care about you, the customer and we want to share all this timber with you so you can put it up in your home and you can look at it and pass it on to other generations or else this goes to landfill and it's also saving the planet from co2. It's stored in the timber so
if it's gets burnt or rots in the forest it's released back into the atmosphere.
So what you're doing is you're helping the environment by purchasing recycled materials.