20 Years, and Stainless Steel Excellence Continues On

Together, We Have Made a Truly Impressive Sandwich.

20 years ago, I ordered the first container of stainless steel benches and Brayco was born.
That container had 8 stainless benches in it, no sinks, just benches. When it arrived, I wasn’t disappointed with the quality, so I shoved a few ads in the local papers, and put up a few auctions on eBay to see how these few products would sell. Well, bugger me, the phones starting ringing and within 6 weeks, I was back ordering the second container. I drafted my brother in law Dan in to help sell them. This container had 15 products. I was going out on a limb now. Now we had some wall shelves and a single cabinet crammed in. What recklessness! My wife and a few of my friends started asking whether I would saturate the market.

Who would want that many stainless steel benches? Why are they so popular?
These are disturbing questions. When you’ve found something you like doing and it’s going well, you don’t like to think it’ll just fizzle out. The fun part of business is the growth. The connection with colleagues and customers. So, I started asking the customers why the hell they were buying so many benches from us. If I didn’t know the answer, maybe they would. Could we do even better? Could we grow?

The customers said it basically came down to 4 simple things:
1. Quality — the benches had to be good quality — sturdy, built for purpose and durable.
2. Price — we were priced well below the lazy competitors who’d been price gouging for decades.
3. Availability — customers liked being able to get their stuff same day, not wait for weeks.
4. Range — we had an OK range of sizes, but they would have bought more if we had more to offer.

So, armed with this knowledge, we decided to make sure we followed these 4 ideas. We call them the 4-Pillars.
And now, 20 years later, you can see the result.
• Those 8 products have turned into a mind boggling range of over 1,200 products. Benches, sinks, shelves, cabinets, chairs, tables, wheels, taps in a vast assortment of sizes, styles, materials. So, range is covered.
• In 2003, we had a 96 square metre warehouse in Perth. Pokey. Now, we have over 20,000 sqm of warehousing across Australia and New Zealand — we are available. Pick it up same day. Buy online. Ring. Whatevs.
• And price? Well, in 2005 our smallest bench was $199. Today, despite a pandemic, a global financial crisis, and rampant inflation across wages, warehouse costs, freight and everything else thrown up at us, that same bench is $249. And we’ll bring the price down if we can.
• As for quality, we have tirelessly worked to improve the strength and quality of the products we sell. Crap doesn’t sell for long. And if something goes wrong we’ll fix it.

The result of all this? Each year now, we expect to sell over 24,000 shelving units, over 50,000 benches, sinks and cabinets and 60,000 chairs. That’s a lot. Hard to visualise, but let’s give it a go..

Let’s imagine that we got all of our customers together to make a sandwich, the biggest sandwich in the world. The current world record for the biggest sandwich is 74 metres. But I think we can do better.

Let’s put all the benches together that you guys have bought in one long line to form the longest bench. If we started building it on the outskirts of Newcastle, then it would wind its way down the coast through Sydney and end up somewhere in the middle of Wollongong. The bench would be 255,000 metres long. That’s quite a big bench. And we’d need a lot of butter. And a lot of people. And let’s hope there isn’t a shortage of lettuce when we do it.

But luckily, we have a lot of customers that might pitch in to help. There are 140,652 current customers of Brayco and Chairforce, enough to fill both the MCG and the SCG. If we all pitched in, I think the sandwich wouldn’t take long to make at all. Wouldn’t take long to eat it either.

So, thank you lovely customers. The Brayco team are wholly reliant on your goodwill and continued custom. We hope to earn it. We are committed to the 4-pillars approach — and hopefully, together, in another twenty years time, we can make a sandwich to stretch from Sydney to Melbourne and beyond.