Harbour is a high-end Australian furniture and lifestyle brand making waves in luxury retail.
It has showrooms across the US in Florida, Texas and California, and an international presence in China, South Korea and, of course, its home country of Australia. Earlier this year, it opened a global flagship on the corner of Madison Avenue and E 27th Street in New York City.
The flagship measures an impressive 740sqm, which is much larger than Harbour’s previous New York flagship, and marks a major step forward in the brand’s 15-year history.
As Harbour’s co-founder and chief creative officer Nicholas Condos told Inside Retail, “It’s a special moment to be unveiling our New York showroom, now the flagship of our global business. As a family-owned company that originated in 1976 from a humble workshop in Sydney, Australia, it’s iconic to see how the brand has grown into the global leader that it is today. This showroom is a testament to where our journey began all of those years ago and is representative of what’s to come.”
While Harbour has been in business for over 15 years, the history of the company goes back much further.
Then dubbed Tecno Furniture, the company was founded in 1976 by Jim Condos, a blacksmith from Greece, who taught his sons, Nicholas and Harrison, how to design and handcraft furniture.
Nicholas officially started working for the family business in 2001, initially as the production manager before moving on to his role as design and development director in 2007.
By 2010, he and his brother Harrison saw a gap in the market for upscale outdoor furniture and decided to reposition the company to fill in that space.
“We came up with the idea to create an Australian lifestyle brand that was focused on outdoor living and beautiful furniture. A lot of the inspiration and the ethos of the brand comes from growing up in Sydney, Australia, and growing up by the beach, living outside, and the warm weather that we had growing up,” Nicholas recalled.
The brothers set about launching Harbour, with Nicholas as the brand’s chief creative officer and Harrison as the CEO. With collections inspired by the Australian coastline, the brothers wanted to ensure the pieces represented an outdoorsy, but still elevated, approach to luxury.
Harbour is now a large-scale, vertically structured endeavour, with control over all the processes from design to manufacturing to global distribution of the finished product.
It is “one of the fastest-growing luxury outdoor brands in the US”, Harrison said.
“Harbour’s biggest strength is that we are vertically integrated, meaning we own our own manufacturing and sourcing facilities and control the whole process, from design and manufacturing to distribution across global markets,” he told Inside Retail.
In addition to the company’s steady store expansion, it has built a reputation for custom furniture, which accounts for 30 per cent of Harbour’s profits today. Among its clients are well-known hospitality brands like Four Seasons and Soho House.
The increased demand for outdoor furniture following the Covid-19 pandemic has been a major factor in the company’s recent growth, Nicholas said.
Harbour’s sales have grown 250 per cent since 2020, the brand stated, a pace the company plans to continue moving at through next year.
In October, Harbour will be premiering new outdoor furniture collections at the High Point Furniture Market in North Carolina.
“Our new collections take Harbour to a new level of outdoor luxury, with fully upholstered pieces retaining their elegance, even in the harshest of climates,” Nicholas said. “They seamlessly bridge the realms of indoor comfort and outdoor resilience, and cultivate inviting and chic outdoor sanctuaries to elevate any setting.”
The brand will also be exhibiting its products at the Salone del Mobile Milano, otherwise known as the Milan Furniture Fair, the largest trade fair of its kind in the world, in April next year, as it looks to expand its presence in Europe.
While Harbour is a very different business today from its origins as Tecno Furniture, Nicholas said that “the family is still very involved. My father loves the fact that we have continued in the same field as him, so everyone’s happy.”
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