Our story — Meet Christine
I moved to Margaret River in March 2019 with four boxes of kitchen stuff, a 2008 Hilux, and absolutely no plan beyond getting out of Sydney. I'd spent 27 years in corporate insurance, the last eight as a claims director for a mid-tier firm in Barangaroo. Good money, long hours, and a view of the harbour I barely had time to look at. When the redundancy offer came through at 53, I took it the same afternoon. My husband thought I was having a breakdown. I thought I was finally having a clear moment. We sold the Balmain terrace, paid off what needed paying off, and drove west. I didn't know a single person in the Southwest.
Before Harrow Goods existed, I spent about eighteen months just figuring out what the region actually needed, not what I imagined it needed from a distance. I walked the Cape to Cape Track three times, drove up to Bunbury for markets, spent weekends at the Cowaramup farmers market talking to people who actually lived and worked outdoors here. What I kept noticing was that the gear people trusted, the stuff that actually got used, was either very expensive imported kit or stuff they'd had for years and couldn't replace locally. The online options were mostly generic, poorly described, and shipped from Brisbane or Melbourne with no real knowledge of Southwest WA conditions behind them.
Harrow Goods started in a shed behind our rental in Rosa Brook in late 2020. The name came from Harrow Road, the street in Balmain where I'd lived for eleven years. Bit of a joke to myself, really. I spent $14,000 of the redundancy money getting the first range properly tested and photographed, and another three months building the website myself on Shopify because I couldn't justify the agency quotes I was getting. The first real order came from a woman in Nannup who'd found us through a Facebook group for Cape to Cape walkers. She emailed to ask if the hiking boots ran narrow or wide. That one question told me we were doing something right, because someone was actually thinking about fit.
These days we operate out of a proper space on Bussell Highway, about four kilometres south of the Margaret River townsite. There are three of us now. We ship around 200 orders a month, mostly to WA and Victoria, with a growing number going to Tasmania. I still answer most of the customer emails myself, usually between six and eight in the morning before the day gets away from me. It's a smaller life than the one I had in Sydney, in terms of square footage and salary. Everything else is bigger.
— Built here, meant to be used. — Christine, Christine Gonzales
Journal
A wet Tuesday in Pemberton and what came of it
I drove four hours to meet a tannery rep I'd only emailed twice, and somehow it turned into the best sourcing decision I've made.
The Outback Explorer boots had been giving me grief for months before I sorted the upper leather. My original supplier, based outside Geelong, folded in late 2023 and left me with about 40 pairs worth of unusable stock and no clear path forward. I'd been patching things together with a Perth-based importer who was fine, technically, but the leather came back from customers looking tired after six months of hard use. That's not acceptable when someone's paid good money for a boot they expect to last a karri forest winter.
A contact from my old logistics days mentioned a small tannery operation working out of the Pemberton area, supplying mostly to the equestrian market in the south-west. I emailed, got a slow reply, emailed again. Eventually I just drove down on a Tuesday in early March when the forest was still holding some of the summer's heat. The workshop was behind a machinery shed off Old Vasse Road and smelled exactly like you'd expect a tannery to smell. Not unpleasant, just animal and honest.
The owner, a bloke named Ray who'd been working leather for 31 years, walked me through his full-grain side leather and a water-resistant treated hide he'd been developing for trail boot uppers. The treated hide had gone through 18 months of iteration. He'd been testing it himself on weekend walks through Beedelup National Park, which I respected enormously. He wasn't pitching me anything. He just showed me the samples and let the work speak.
We agreed on a trial run of 60 pairs worth of upper panels, with a review after six months of customer feedback. I got home after 9pm, ate cold pasta, and wrote up my notes before I forgot the details. That's the unglamorous version of how Harrow Goods sources its materials. No trade shows, no slick catalogues. Just a long drive and a conversation with someone who actually knows what they're doing.
The boots using Ray's leather have been out since late July. I've had 3 returns in that time, all sizing, none material. I'm calling that a success. We're extending the arrangement through the next production run.
What I actually use the Koala Grove mat for
I started selling yoga mats without doing much yoga, and six months of honest use has changed how I talk about this product entirely.
When I added the Koala Grove Yoga Mat to the Harrow Goods range last February, I'd done maybe a dozen yoga classes in my life. All of them in a Surry Hills studio circa 2009, during a period when I thought I was the kind of person who does yoga. I am not that person. What I actually am is someone who wakes up at 5:45am in Margaret River, has a stiff lower back from too many years at a desk, and needs about 20 minutes of floor stretching before I can face the day properly.
The mat gets used every morning on the deck outside the studio space I converted from the old shed. In winter that deck is cold and sometimes wet around the edges, so the first thing I noticed was how the mat's surface held up to damp conditions. It doesn't curl at the corners after moisture exposure, which was a genuine concern I had when I was spec-ing it. I'd rejected two earlier samples from a Brisbane supplier specifically because of corner curl after humidity testing.
I'm not going to pretend I'm flowing through vinyasa sequences at sunrise. What I do is about 15 minutes of stretching, some floor work for the lower back, and occasionally a proper attempt at something I've watched on YouTube. The mat is 4mm thick, which I've found is the right trade-off between cushioning and stability. Thicker mats feel good on knees but I lose the ground connection on balance poses, and I am apparently now the kind of person who has opinions about that.
The texture is the thing customers ask about most, and it's the thing I'd struggled to describe in the product copy. It's got enough grip that your palms don't slide when you're sweaty, but it's not so aggressively textured that it's uncomfortable to lie on. I've been on mats that feel like fine sandpaper and mats that are basically a slippery rubber sheet. This one sits in a sensible middle ground, which is where most useful things live.
I've now put about 180 sessions on the mat I keep for my own use. The surface is showing some wear at the centre where my feet land most consistently, which is honest and expected. I tell customers to expect the same. It's not a flaw. It's just a mat being used.
Winter packing runs and the rhythm of running small
August through October is when I finally feel like I understand what this business actually is, which is mostly boxes and spreadsheets.
I spent 22 years in supply chain management for a mid-sized retail group in Sydney. You'd think that would make running a small e-commerce operation straightforward. In some ways it does. I know how to read a shipping manifest and I don't panic when a carrier loses a pallet. But nothing in corporate logistics quite prepares you for the specific experience of packing 34 orders by yourself on a Wednesday evening while it rains sideways off the Indian Ocean and the power flickers twice.
The studio, which is what I call the shed I converted into a workspace, has a long bench that runs the full 6-metre south wall. Orders come in through the website overnight and I pick and pack each morning between about 7 and 9, then do a second run on busy days after dinner. The Kangaroo Ridge Running Shorts pack flat and easy. The bodyboards are the problem. The SurfMist Bodyboard in its packaging is 117cm long and needs a specific outer box that I had to source separately because standard satchels are useless.
I've got a system now that took about eight months to arrive at. Orders go into the queue, I pull stock from the shelves along the east wall, pack by product type to keep movements efficient, and seal everything before I print labels. Printing labels before packing was a habit I had to break because I kept grabbing the wrong box in a hurry and mislabelling. Three mislabelled orders in the first six months, zero in the last six. Small improvements compound.
The winter months here are genuinely beautiful in a way I didn't expect when I moved down from Manly in 2021. The karri trees hold their colour and the light in the afternoons is low and golden. I do sometimes stand at the shed door with a cup of tea and think about how different this is from a Monday in a CBD office tower. Not better in every way. Quieter, certainly. More mine.
November is when the summer orders start building, mostly the bodyboards and shorts as people think about school holidays. I ordered extra SurfMist stock in September based on last year's numbers and I'm hoping I got that right. If I didn't, I'll be apologising to customers in January, which is a thing I've done before and would prefer not to repeat.
The January swells and what I did with them
I hadn't bodyboarded since I was about 19 years old, and a big January swell at Prevelly gave me a reason to try again.
There's a particular kind of embarrassment that comes from being 54 years old and wiping out in front of a group of teenagers at Prevelly Beach. I want to be clear that this happened to me at least four times across two sessions in January and I am mostly fine about it. I added the SurfMist Bodyboard to the Harrow Goods range last year partly because bodyboarding felt accessible in a way that surfing doesn't, and partly because the south-west coast is genuinely one of the best places in the country to do it. I felt I should actually know what I was selling.
The January swells at Margaret River were running about 1.5 to 2 metres at the beach breaks, which is on the larger end of what I'd recommend for someone who last bodyboarded in 1990 in Cronulla. I went out twice in the first week and spent most of the first session just remembering how to read a wave and when to kick. The board itself is 107cm, which is the size I stocked most heavily, and it suits my height reasonably well. Buoyancy felt right. I didn't feel like I was fighting it.
By the second session I was catching waves consistently enough to feel like I understood the product from the inside rather than just from a spec sheet. The slick bottom tracked well and the channels on the underside do actually seem to help with directional control, though I'll admit I can't fully separate genuine product performance from beginner luck. What I can say is that nothing failed, nothing felt cheap, and I didn't come home with bruises from the rails, which has happened to me on badly designed boards in the past.
I've updated the product page based on what I learned. The size guide now has a clearer note about board length relative to rider height, because I got a handful of questions about that in December and realised I hadn't been specific enough. I also added a note about leash attachment, because a customer from Dunsborough emailed in January to say the leash plug position wasn't obvious. She was right. I should have caught that earlier.
The teenagers at Prevelly were, for the record, quite friendly. One of them gave me an unsolicited tip about dropping my shoulders on takeoff that was genuinely useful. I thanked her sincerely and tried not to look too relieved.
Customer reviews
Tara M. — Cottesloe, WA — 2024-03-14 — 5/5
Boots arrived faster than expected
Ordered the Outback Explorer Hiking Boots on a Tuesday and they showed up Thursday morning, which I wasn't expecting at all. Sizing was true to the chart — I'm usually between sizes and went with the larger one based on the FAQ, which was the right call. Wore them on a trail near Yallingup last weekend and they held up well on the rocky sections.
James R. — Newtown, NSW — 2024-06-22 — 4/5
Good mat, slight smell at first
The Koala Grove Yoga Mat is solid — good grip, decent thickness, and it unrolls flat without needing to be weighted down. There was a slight rubber smell when I first opened it, but that faded after a couple of days airing out. Would've been five stars if the carry strap was a bit longer.
Priya S. — Brunswick, VIC — 2024-08-05 — 5/5
Running shorts actually fit
I've been burned by sizing on running shorts before, but the Kangaroo Ridge shorts fit exactly as described. The inner liner is comfortable and doesn't shift around, which is the main thing I care about. Ordered express and they arrived the next day.
Lachlan B. — Manly, NSW — 2024-09-18 — 4/5
SurfMist bodyboard does the job
Bought the SurfMist for my kids after the old board cracked. It came well packaged — no dents or pressure marks — and the kids were happy with it straight away. The leash attachment point feels a bit flimsy, but the board itself has handled a full summer without issues so far.
Sophie T. — Fitzroy, VIC — 2024-11-30 — 5/5
Great experience start to finish
I emailed before ordering to ask about the yoga mat material because I have a latex sensitivity, and someone replied within a few hours with clear information. The mat itself arrived in good shape and the packaging was minimal, which I appreciated. Happy to buy from Harrow Goods again.
Daniel K. — West End, QLD — 2025-01-09 — 4/5
Volleyball is good value
The Billabong Beach Volleyball arrived inflated to a reasonable level and ready to use. It's held air well over a few weeks of regular use at South Bank. Probably not quite at the level of the more expensive brands, but for the price it's hard to fault.
Mei L. — Surry Hills, NSW — 2025-02-17 — 5/5
Hiking boots are the real deal
Did two days in the Blue Mountains in the Outback Explorer boots and my feet were fine — no hotspots, no blisters. The ankle support is firm without being restrictive, which is exactly what I needed on uneven terrain. Shipping was standard but still arrived within four days to Sydney.
Aaron F. — Glenelg, SA — 2025-03-28 — 5/5
Fast delivery, no fuss
Ordered the Kangaroo Ridge Running Shorts as a last-minute gift and selected express shipping. They arrived the following morning, gift wrapped neatly with a handwritten card. The recipient was happy with the fit and the quality looks solid.
Shipping
We ship Australia-wide using Australia Post for standard delivery and StarTrack for express. Standard orders typically arrive in 3–8 business days — metro areas like Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide are usually at the shorter end of that window, while regional WA, NT and remote areas can take up to 8 business days or occasionally a little longer. Express orders placed before 2pm AEST Monday to Friday generally arrive within 1–3 business days for major metro areas. All orders are dispatched from our workshop in Margaret River, WA. You'll receive a tracking number by email once your order leaves us.
Shipping is free on orders over $80 AUD. Orders under $80 attract a flat $9.95 standard shipping fee or $14.95 for express. All prices shown on our website include GST, and your tax invoice will be included in your shipping confirmation email. We pack orders in recycled cardboard boxes and use paper-based void fill rather than plastic where possible. Fragile items like the SurfMist Bodyboard are double-boxed for extra protection during transit.
If your order arrives damaged, please take clear photos of both the packaging and the product and email them to hello@harrowgoods.com.au within 48 hours of delivery. We'll assess the damage and either send a replacement or arrange a refund — whichever works best for you. We lodge claims with Australia Post and StarTrack on your behalf, so you don't need to deal with the carriers directly. We do not ship internationally at this time, but we're looking into it for late 2025.
Returns
You have 30 days from the date your order is delivered to request a return. To be eligible for a change-of-mind return, items must be unused, unwashed, and in their original condition with any tags still attached. To start a return, email hello@harrowgoods.com.au with your order number and a brief description of why you'd like to return the item. We'll respond within one business day with return instructions. Return postage for change-of-mind returns is at your cost, and we recommend using a tracked service as we can't be responsible for items lost in return transit.
Your rights under the Australian Consumer Law apply to all purchases from Harrow Goods, regardless of our standard return window or any other conditions listed here. If a product arrives faulty, is not fit for its described purpose, or doesn't match the product description on our website, you are entitled to a remedy — this may be a repair, replacement or refund depending on the nature of the issue. In these cases, we will cover return shipping costs. Please contact us as soon as you notice a problem so we can sort it out quickly.
Once we receive and inspect your returned item, we'll process your refund within 5 business days. Refunds are issued to your original payment method — credit card refunds may take an additional 3–5 business days to appear depending on your bank. We don't offer store credit as a default, but if you'd prefer that option, just let us know and we can arrange it. Sale items are excluded from change-of-mind returns but remain covered by Australian Consumer Law for faults. If you're unsure whether your situation qualifies, email us and we'll give you a straight answer.