Caroline Olah is a furniture designer of mixed Australian and Indonesian parentage who founded Reddie Furniture in 2016. She saw a market for customised furniture and her Sydney business set up a factory in Central Java using wood from local plantations and now exports to 20 countries.
She attributes her success to choosing customised products rather than standardised mass production. She’s also determined to disprove the ‘poor quality’ reputation of Indonesian sourced products that persists in the minds of global furniture buyers.
One way to change market perception is to showcase Indonesian craftsmanship and proudly declare her exports as Indonesian made. According to Caroline, this means building loyalty among her 50 highly skilled workforce, who autonomously ran the factory in her absence for 2 years during the pandemic.