From spying a growing category on Google Search to becoming a household name across Australia and New Zealand (not to mention expanding in Hong Kong and the US), the husband-and-wife duo behind Miss Amara, Alexandra and Aaron Weller, know a thing or two about category disruption.
It’s 2014 and Aaron Weller is working in the SEO space when he notices something interesting: an unusually high search volume for rugs. Eleven years later, Weller and his wife Alexandra Weller are behind $26 million rug retailer, Miss Amara. With customer-led product innovation as its main driver, Miss Amara – which has never taken on external investment – has a growing footprint in international markets, 36% year-on-year sales growth and 70+ staff members across Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and the United States.
“We identified early on that there was something falling down between the search – the inspiration piece – and the purchase piece,” Alexandra says. For starters, marketing was male-focused, when women tend to make the majority of household décor decisions. “I had a vision where I really wanted to lead with having that exciting, inspirational feeling, and continuing that on to the purchase piece with a crafted, curated, exceptional customer journey. We named it Miss Amara to cater to that beautiful feminine experience and give it a female voice, and I think that resonated.”
Miss Amara grew an Instagram following of 270,000 and its socials took off long before the company manufactured its own rugs in its 3,000-square-metre Sydney warehouse (which it’s since outgrown). In fact, Miss Amara’s early marketing strategy wasn’t about selling rugs at all: “I was just trying to tap into people that appreciated beautiful home décor,” Alexandra recalls.
“People who loved homewares and beautiful content, they started following our page and tagging their mums and their cousins or grandparents. The strategy was: follow us for our inspirational content, and if you buy a rug along the way, that’s great.”
We have a Slack channel where we broadcast customer feedback every day. So, everyone across every division – warehouse, product, content – can see what products are resonating and which ones aren’t.
Alexandra Weller, co-founder, creative director, Miss Amara
Alexandra, who studied architecture at university but found her way into tech, met Aaron, who’d sold his business and was consulting to SEO companies, online. They connected over a mutual love of entrepreneurship and business and made an agreement to never – ever – work together.
“He’d tell me what he was doing and I’d constantly look over his shoulder and say, ‘Oh no, I’d do it this way.’ Eventually, it became like a shared group project. He had a very clear strength in operations, finance and business – it was completely opposite to mine. I was the product, brand, look-and-feel. So, we made it work.”
The company initially launched as a curated offering of rugs from other distributors, but margins were thin. Aaron, the company’s CEO, says the pair knew the long game was in their own range. They took off overseas to gather design inspiration, and Aaron says he set his wife, the company’s creative director, a limit: “I said, ‘you can design four products’. In the end, it was closer to 60 or 70.”
“I went crazy,” Alexandra says.
In 2018, they put their designs up online on a pre-order basis, and found they were able to cover the cost of the entire collection before it even landed in the country. It remains Miss Amara’s strategy and is how its founders have managed to bootstrap the company to this day. (Alexandra says they have since had investment interest, but have chosen to fund the business on their own).
Miss Amara was enjoying a steady rise to success until COVID-19. On the one hand, they were an online-only business, which worked in their favour. On the other? Logistics were tricky. They outgrew their first warehouse, then their second, before they landed their third (in a construction drought) and suppliers weren’t allowed to deliver product. More recently, the cost of living crisis has taken its toll.
“A lot of people are spending less,” Aaron says. “The rug category overall in the last three years has shrunk.”
In Australia, the carpets and rugs market is worth about US$856 million (AU$1.32 billion), and it’s expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 2.93% between 2025 and 2029. according to Statista. More granularly though, global area rug sales are down about 4% to US$2.67 billion.
“We are still managing to grow, but we have seen a big shift in what products are selling,” Aaron says. “Our middle-to-higher-price-point products have seen quite a big drop, but we’ve invested and adjusted. The upside is that our washable range and our playmats are growing.”
On that, Alexandra interjects to say its washable rugs and Rollie Pollie playmats are a result of the company’s customer-led innovation strategy.
“Customers with children want something hypo-allergenic and soft. Customers with dogs want something stain resistant and washable,” Alexandra says. “We have a Slack channel where we broadcast customer feedback every day. So, everyone across every division – warehouse, product, content – can see what products are resonating and which ones aren’t.”
In fact, the Rollie Pollie collection was born of Alexandra’s own pain point, after the pair had their second child – though it was in the works after their first. It’s cushioned, non-slip and stain resistant. After its sell-out debut in late 2023, Miss Amara has expanded that collection with 24 new SKUs.
Looking ahead, Aaron says, US President Donald Trump’s tariffs could pose another logistics nightmare, but with so much uncertainty, the plan is to stay fluid.
“We have products from China that are quite popular in the US, but we do have back-up options and we can move our production to other countries with lower tariffs. We haven’t done it yet, but there is that option.”
The company is also planning to grow its nascent B2B strategy. Over the last two years, the distribution channel has grown from nil to 26% of the company’s sales. It increased 15% to 26% in the last 12 months, growing at CAGR of 170% year-on-year. Now, they sell to distributors like Freedom, Myer, Baby Bunting and Barbecues Galore, with more large retailers in the pipeline.
“We built our company off the back of asking customers what their experience was with buying rugs, and that drove everything. We will continue to do that,” Alexandra says.
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