In early 2014 a young couple in Dee Why made the bold decision to leave their corporate careers and pursue their own business venture. Bree, fuelled by her passion for renovation and excellent project management skills along with Brady’s down-to-earth, win-win mindset, made them an unstoppable team.
Now, a decade and 2,200 renovated kitchens later, Brady and Bree remain as passionate as ever about improving the lives of their customers – one kitchen (or laundry!) at a time. As they celebrate 10 years of serving Sydney, they reflect on the invaluable lessons learned along the way and express gratitude to their customers for supporting local, family owned businesses like theirs.
What made you choose to start your own business 10 years ago?
Brady was looking for a career change and after recently completing our 3rd renovation of our own, Brady had a keen desire to further explore his new found interest of renovating. When we came across the opportunity to launch Dream Doors Kitchens in Australia as one of the first franchisees it was a no-brainer.
What are your reflections on the kitchen industry over the past 10 years? How has it changed? How has it stayed the same? Kitchen styles have evolved quite a lot over 10 years. Rewind to 2014 and customers were still choosing cream based colour schemes and there were almost no shaker doors in sight. Fast forward to today and we are seeing mostly white kitchens with hints of green, blue and grey combined with wood look finishes and a large percentage of our doors are either shaker or V-groove profile. So I guess you could say that we’ve moved from simple and elegant kitchens to kitchens with a bit more character and colour.
What are the ‘must-haves’ when renovating a kitchen?
We always try to add a pull-out bin if there isn’t already one in the kitchen and if space permits. The other must have is drawers, drawers and more drawers. These enable customers to use the real estate inside their cupboards much more effectively.
What’s been a highlight for you over the past 10 years?
10 years has seen us experience many exciting milestones that we’re proud of. The highlight for us have been our ability to maintain our high standards of customer service over the years, seeing some customers return for their second or even third renovation with us. It is a real highlight for us to see customers love and enjoy their kitchens again after working with Dream Doors.
What keeps you going on the tough days?
Experience tells us that the touch days are temporary. Knowing the any tough time will pass makes those days easier to navigate.
During this time you’ve had 2 beautiful children, how do you juggle home and business life? With great difficulty some days! Any parents who are juggling full-time work and the multitude of WhatsApp notifications that ping on your phone each day know that the juggle is real! We do have a lot of flexibility though which helps when navigating drop-offs, pick-ups and after school activities. Our kids are very familiar with us working at all hours of the day, night and weekends and they don’t know any different. I guess at the end of the day we both work as a team and whether its chores around the house, emails in the inbox or kids activities – we just pitch in and do our bit.
You’ve recently designed your own dream kitchen for your own home, what is your favourite part? This will be the first kitchen we have had together where we have a breakfast bar which is going to be a game-changer for us. I have to say though, my favourite part is probably the natural stone bench top and splashback. It’s a real wow piece of stone and I’m totally in love with it.
What trends do you see growing or remaining the same for the next 10 years for the kitchen industry? I think that the trends are cyclical and with scandi and hamptons styles being so big for the last 10+ years we have seen a lot of white monotone kitchens. I predict customers will start to bring a bit more colour back into their home and experimenting with textures too.
Your business is a proud supporter of the Humpty Dumpty Foundation who supplies vital medical equipment for children’s hospitals around Australia, tell us a bit about that. Our youngest daughter was in critical care at the Royal North Shore NICU for 4 weeks when she was born. It was here that one of the wonderful doctors looking after our daughter introduced us to the Humpty Dumpty Foundation. Once familiar, we were blown away by the number or pieces of equipment that surrounded our daughter’s crib that displayed the Humpty Dumpty logo and had been donated by both businesses and ordinary everyday people. We felt compelled after that experience to give back to other children and families that would come after us. We love that the money donated to the Humpty Dumpty Foundation directly translates to pieces of equipment donated to hospitals across Australia.