This case study was adapted from the 2025 Sydney Elevate session, “Scaling with Confidence: How Freedom Furniture Delivers Excellence in Customer and Vendor Operations with monday.com,” presented by Quentin Williams, Head of Dropship at Freedom Furniture.

Meet Freedom Furniture

Founded in 1981, Freedom is one of Australia’s most iconic interiors brands — with 58 stores across Australia and New Zealand, and a long-standing reputation for design-led furniture and homewares.

To expand its range and meet growing demand for online convenience, Freedom launched a dropship program: a curated, inventory-light model that broadens range without holding stock. The strategy improves margins, accelerates digital growth, and strengthens Freedom’s position against pure-play online competitors.

Now in its third year, the program supports over 48,000 products from nearly 150 Australian vendors — managed by a cross-functional team spanning sales, merchandising, logistics, compliance, and finance.

The challenge

Freedom’s dropship program was growing rapidly — adding products, vendors, and new team members across Australia and offshore. But with that scale came complexity.

Key processes like onboarding, product setup, and vendor compliance passed through multiple teams, including sales, merchandising, logistics, finance, and customer service. Each team had its own way of working, and collaboration often relied on spreadsheets, email threads, and manual follow-ups.

As the program expanded, so did the risk of delays, duplicated work, and missed steps. Teams lacked shared visibility. Communication was scattered. And operational bottlenecks began to slow momentum.

“We were chasing a high nine-figure sales target within five years and growing fast,” says Quentin Williams, Head of Dropship at Freedom Furniture. “But without the right structure, that growth started to create friction.”

What Freedom needed was a way to coordinate work across functions — with clarity, consistency, and control.

The solution

Why monday CRM?

Freedom adopted monday CRM to centralize vendor operations and improve visibility across teams. The goal: replace siloed tools with one environment to manage vendor relationships, streamline onboarding, and stay on top of compliance — all at speed.

“We needed one platform to scale with clarity,” says Williams. “With monday CRM, we’ve built a single source of truth that connects people, processes, and vendors — and gives every team the visibility they need to move faster and make better decisions.”

With support from monday.com’s onboarding team, Freedom migrated legacy data, restructured key workflows and brought consistency to how contacts, tasks, and communication were managed. Two internal champions — one onshore, one offshore — led training and rollout, helping embed monday CRM into daily operations.

Scaling supplier relationships — from onboarding to go-live

Freedom’s dropship program was designed for growth — and with hundreds of vendors and thousands of Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) in motion, managing supplier relationships at scale became critical. Each vendor moves through a multi-stage journey, from business development and onboarding to product setup, logistics, compliance, and finance. Each step touches multiple teams, and without a shared system, handovers slipped and progress was hard to track.

With monday CRM, Freedom now manages the entire lifecycle in one connected environment. All vendor interactions — from early engagement to go-live — are anchored to a shared vendor record. Tasks are automatically assigned, communication is visible in real-time, and every team can see exactly where a vendor sits in the pipeline.

“Onboarding a vendor touches sales, merchandising, logistics, finance, and more,” says Williams. “The structure we’ve built in monday CRM helps us move faster, cut down on repeated effort, and keep everyone aligned.”

Instead of relying on manual follow-ups or fragmented tools, teams now work from a single source of truth — bringing structure and consistency to every supplier relationship, and laying the foundation for scalable, long-term partnerships as the program grows.

Managing high-volume compliance with precision

In 2024, Freedom faced a series of new regulatory requirements that affected its entire dropship range — requiring detailed packaging and product compliance data across all products and vendors. The stakes were high: incomplete documentation could result in fines from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) and delays to product availability.

With monday CRM, the team launched dedicated workflows to manage each compliance program. Forms were tied directly to vendor records, dashboards kept stakeholders aligned, and automations ensured nothing was overlooked.

“We had five major compliance programs to run this year — and one of them touched every product in our range,” says Williams. “monday CRM helped us move fast, stay on top of it, and avoid costly gaps.”

What was once managed across spreadsheets and inboxes is now run through a single, auditable system — purpose-built to handle scale, urgency, and cross-functional coordination.

Enabling cross-functional scale through shared visiblity

Dropship isn’t just a sales initiative — it’s a multi-team operation involving account managers, logistics, merchandising, finance, compliance, and offshore support. As the program expanded, Freedom needed a way to keep everyone aligned — without slowing down.

monday CRM became that unifying layer. Key workflows are now visible across departments, with dashboards that help each team focus on what matters most. Finance can check contract status. Logistics can see go-live readiness. Leadership can track progress in real-time.

“That’s really been the connecting point for us — having one universal platform that keeps every function aligned,” says Williams.

What began as a solution for one team has become the backbone of Freedom’s dropship operations — and a model for how scale and structure can go hand in hand.

The impact

monday CRM has helped Freedom transform how its dropship team operates — bringing structure, visibility, and accountability to every part of the vendor lifecycle — anchored to one vendor record. Workflows are connected, tasks are traceable, and communication is no longer buried in inboxes or spreadsheets.

“The system won’t let you cut corners — and that’s a good thing,” says Williams. “Everyone knows what they’re responsible for, and they can see how their work fits into the bigger picture.”

Since rollout, Freedom has saved 8,106 hours annually, recovered $272,285 in productivity, and delivered a 26x return on investment — all while scaling its dropship program without adding headcount or losing operational momentum.

As the team and vendor base have grown, monday CRM has enabled scale without compromise — supporting fast onboarding, high-volume compliance, and alignment across functions and time zones.

“We’ve grown fast,” says Williams. “Without monday CRM, we’d be chasing updates and fixing errors. Now we’re focused on growing the program — not just keeping up with it.”