How Linen House rebuilt a 33-year-old wholesale brand for a channel-everything market
Wed, 22nd Jul 2026 (Today)
Half of the Australian bedlinen company's sales now come direct to consumer. Its head of technology says the shift rested on one architectural decision made a decade ago.
When IT Director, Tez Osman, joined Linen House close to 25 years ago, the Melbourne bedlinen and homewares company was a pure wholesaler. Founded in 1993 as an Australian family-owned business, it supplied the major department stores and produced white label ranges alongside its own brand. Orders arrived through EDI connections and fax machines, and the operating model had stayed recognisably the same for years.
As the big retailers grew confident enough to develop product themselves, the white label work fell away and Linen House made a strategic decision to put its own brand at the centre of the business. It opened more than 20 stores within the space of a few years and still operates a national retail network today. It built a direct-to-consumer web business. And as its wholesale customers pushed into eCommerce themselves, drop shipping emerged as a significant channel - with major retailers selling Linen House product on their own websites and transmitting orders electronically for the brand to fulfil.
The result is a business that trades in every way possible - wholesale, retail, web and drop shipping. A decade or so ago roughly 90 per cent of sales came through wholesale. Today more than half of revenue arrives through Linen House's own consumer channels and once drop shipping is counted, a solidchunk of
Every one of those relationships carries technical obligations. Orders need to arrive electronically and flow straight into fulfilment and the data trail behind them - from inventory positions to invoices and tracking updates - has to stay accurate without manual handling. Osman is blunt about the alternative: without that architecture, the business would need many people manually pulling files, importing orders and updating tracking by hand.
The architectural answer, arrived at almost ten years ago with implementation partner Annexa, was to make NetSuite the source of truth for the entire operating model. The cloud ERP sits at the centre, and the systems around it - from the web platform to the point of sale to the warehouse - connect back into it.
The contrast with what came before explains the conviction. Linen House previously ran a legacy on-premise system and a separate point of sale platform, with hardware the company managed itself. Change was so difficult and so expensive that good ideas were regularly abandoned at the costing stage. Moving to a cloud ERP with a connected ecosystem changed the economics of change itself. New channels and new partner requirements could be onboarded quickly, at a cost the business could sustain.
A recent example shows what that looks like commercially. Late last year, one of the country's largest online marketplaces asked Linen House to extend its shipping options beyond a single national carrier, using a recommended fulfilment API to generate labels and feed richer delivery data back to the marketplace's customers. The request meant real change inside Linen House's ERP and warehouse management systems. Because those systems were configured for exactly this kind of adaptation, the new fulfilment process was live within about a month.
Osman sees this responsiveness as now simply the price of admission in drop shipping. Drop shipping partners carry many brands, and the suppliers who respond fastest to their requests tend to win a growing share of their trade. Linen House positions itself as the partner that takes on the automation work so the retailer can focus on selling.
There is discipline behind the flexibility. New and unproven partners start on lightly integrated, file-based processes that involve some manual handling. As their volumes grow, the integration deepens, and the company's largest retail partners run fully automated connections. Years of this work have produced another advantage - new integrations inherit most of their design from earlier ones, and Osman estimates that reusing 80 per cent of an existing build is common.
The current project continues the same logic. Linen House is consolidating its web storefront, point of sale and loyalty programme onto Shopify, replacing a separate eCommerce platform and store POS that each handled those functions in isolation. Everything integrates tightly back to NetSuite. The goal is a single view of the customer across the consumer channels and a lower technical integration overhead, so that initiatives like loyalty no longer require custom builds to work consistently in store and online.
Osman also brings a distinctly unromantic perspective to the industry's noisiest topic. He evaluates AI the way he evaluates any other technology - starting from the business problem and doing due diligence on the true cost of ownership. Linen House uses AI tools heavily in reporting and eCommerce operations, and he is equally clear about the situations where conventional automation does a better job.
Osman shared the full story - from the original ERP decision through the platform consolidation and his assessment of AI in retail - at a NORA webinar on 14 July alongside panellists from NetSuite and Annexa. The session is available on-demand here.