My Koala Journey: Into the Treehouse
On Tuesday, 20th November I embarked on a new journey as a Developer Intern in Koala’s digital team. Coming in as the only new kid on the block, I was nervous and intimidated by this unfamiliar yet exciting experience of interning in a start-up. After a week at Koala, I was introduced to Koala’s mission and vision while familiarising myself with the Treehouse (the Koala office), the culture, and the people.
Koala’s vision is to define the future of furniture retailing. Their missions include:
“To deliver a revolutionary customer experience, provide everlasting quality that surprises and delights, and use our influence to challenge the status quo and enhance the greater good”
In the beginning, it does so by disrupting the mattress industry with the ease to buy, try, and return mattresses. I was truly impressed by Koala’s dedication to their vision: from selling their products directly to cut unnecessary costs, offering same-day delivery, to its 120-night trial period with ease of return.
Koala also led by example, as an e-commerce, in environmental consciousness by partnering with WWF and other Koala charities to provide a donation with every mattress sold to help protect and preserve Koalas — hence the name. Koala also adopts a turtle in partnership with WWF for every purchase of their new Koala Sofa.
After my first month at Koala, I realised that Koala lived by these values in the Treehouse. The people at Koala are trusted with a lot of autonomy in their daily decisions, given kudos (praise or appreciation) by their colleagues for jobs well done, and are provided with a lot of freedom, comfort and flexibility to do their best work. Little things like their weekly yoga, basketball sessions and fireside-friyays (weekly workshops) help the people at Koala bond and destress. They also adopt environmental awareness in the office by recycling and encouraging caffeine addicts to use reusable cups!
Meet the Digital Team
I met the digital team on my first day and they’ve been a joy to work with ever since. There’s the Tech Lead Andrew, Product Manager Matt, Email Marketing Manager Ash, UX/UI Designers Pete and Kaoru, as well as Frontend Developers Adelaine, Byron, Kristo, and Indrek. The team is managed by Richard Bremner the Head of Technology, who leads us in our daily standups and monitor the team’s wellbeing.
As a part of my internship, I’ll be going around the digital team taking on different roles depending on the person I’m working with during the day. I’ll be rotating between Email, Dev, Product, DevOps, as well as design and UX.
The first two weeks, Adelaine Ho the Google Analytics (GA) guru, taught me how to analyse data in GA and observe our website visitors’ behaviour to identify potential areas of growth. She also taught me key aspects of e-commerce, growth hacking, and the deployment process at Koala Digital. Learning about conversion rates, bounce rates, customer acquisition and progressive web apps in a week was a steep learning curve, but an amazing experience. I loved the fact that I learned something new every day, taught by experienced and passionate people in the field. One of my first tasks was to add GA event tracking to a few pages on the Koala website so that we could further evaluate the performance of each component in the website and identify areas for improvement later on to drive more traffic.
This week, I sat down with Ash who walked me through Koala’s email marketing automation and CRM. He writes email templates, analyses the traffic it redirects to the website, the revenue potential, and also tests his many template versions to find the best performing email. Moreover, it was interesting to see how Ash’s role encompasses design, technology, UX, marketing and management.
My first month at Koala has been undeniably rewarding and I’m excited to learn more over the next few weeks. In my next post in this series, I’ll delve deeper into my goals, learning experiences, and how I plan to hopefully make a difference during my time here at the Treehouse.
Cheers to Koala-ful weeks ahead! :)
Koala is an Australian startup based in Sydney with a passion for changing the furniture buying experience online because life’s too short to worry about dumb stuff like wasting a whole day waiting for the delivery guy or whether 20 minutes in a showroom was enough to make an educated decision…
Try Koala today at koala.com.
