The Business of Outdoor Living: A Conversation with Dmitry Sabelnikov of Joygarden
A garden chair looks simple enough. It sits on a terrace, beside a swimming pool, outside a restaurant or in the corner of a family garden. Someone chooses it, pays for it, and eventually sits down. But by the time that chair reaches its final destination, it may already have travelled through factories, international supply chains, warehouses, showrooms, delivery networks and changing seasons. Its design has been influenced by materials, climate, customer behaviour and ideas about how people want to live. Behind one apparently simple piece of furniture sits a much larger business system.
That system is the world in which Dmitry Sabelnikov has spent more than a decade. Based in Moscow, Dmitry runs Joygarden, a business selling outdoor furniture and accessories across Russia and neighbouring countries. When he joined Stories of Business from his showroom, surrounded by the products his customers eventually take into their homes and outdoor spaces, he immediately challenged the simplest description of what his company does. Joygarden, he explained, does not really sell furniture. It sells a way of life.
The distinction matters. A customer buying an outdoor sofa is not simply acquiring wood, aluminium, fabric or synthetic fibre arranged into a particular shape. They are imagining something that happens afterwards: a long afternoon outside, friends visiting for drinks, children moving between the house and garden, dinner on the terrace, or an entire weekend spent enjoying a space that might previously have been underused. Dmitry described the feedback he values most as customers telling him that their families, friends or neighbours loved the furniture and that they spent more time together outside because of it. The physical product becomes a tool through which people experience their homes differently.
This is where outdoor furniture becomes part of the wider outdoor living economy. Gardens, balconies, terraces, hotel courtyards, restaurant spaces and pool areas have increasingly become extensions of indoor living. Furniture manufacturers are therefore not competing simply on whether one chair is more attractive than another. They are competing around comfort, aesthetics, durability, service and the customer's idea of the life they want to create around a space. The visible product is furniture. The underlying purchase is experience.
For businesses operating in this world, however, customer aspiration immediately meets something no company can control: the weather. Joygarden operates across a country so geographically vast that the same business can serve customers experiencing radically different climates. Dmitry pointed to the contrast between warmer areas such as Sochi and far colder northern parts of Russia. Across much of the country, outdoor furniture remains intensely seasonal. Sales begin building around the end of March and beginning of April and continue into autumn, with the difference between high and low seasons sometimes reaching four, five or even seven times.
That creates an unusual operating challenge. A seasonal business cannot wait for customers to appear before preparing for them. Products have to exist before the weather changes. Inventory must be available. Suppliers need orders. Warehouses need capacity. Sales teams have to be ready. Marketing has to anticipate demand rather than merely respond to it. Cash may be committed months before the strongest selling period begins.
Dmitry compared the experience to surfing. The business waits for the larger wave, knowing that spring will eventually arrive, and then has to be ready to ride it when it does. It is an unusually useful description of seasonality because the challenge is not simply recognising that the wave exists. Almost everyone in the industry knows when the warmer months are coming. The advantage comes from preparation. Too little stock and the business misses the strongest period of demand. Too much stock and capital may remain trapped in warehouses through the winter. Order too late and international manufacturing and transport timelines may make it impossible to respond.
Weather therefore connects directly to finance, sourcing and logistics. A warm spring may encourage customers to think about gardens earlier. A poor summer may delay purchases. An unusually long autumn might extend the selling season. Forecasting demand becomes part science and part judgement, and the consequences of getting that judgement wrong travel through the entire business.
The supply chain behind the furniture extends far beyond Russia. Dmitry explained that Joygarden currently works primarily with suppliers in Vietnam and has previously worked extensively with manufacturers in China, relationships that illustrate the international nature of an industry whose finished products often appear entirely local once positioned in a showroom or garden. A customer looking at a table in Moscow may never think about where the timber, metal, textiles or manufacturing expertise originated. Yet international sourcing sits beneath the final retail experience.
That creates another set of systems. Manufacturers have production schedules. Materials have costs and lead times. Finished products need transporting. Borders introduce documentation and regulation. Currency movements affect purchasing economics. Political relationships can alter trading conditions. A decision made thousands of miles from the final customer can eventually affect which furniture is available, when it arrives and what it costs.
Dmitry's reflections on global trade were particularly revealing because his perspective went beyond logistics. He spoke about the difficulties created when international relationships become more restricted and expressed a strong preference for business as a mechanism through which people and countries continue connecting. Trade, in this interpretation, is more than the exchange of goods. Businesses establish relationships between people who may live thousands of miles apart, speak different languages and operate within very different political environments. Suppliers, buyers, distributors and customers develop reasons to continue cooperating because both sides benefit from the relationship.
The outdoor furniture arriving in a customer's garden is therefore the final point in an international chain. But even arrival does not necessarily complete the transaction. This was another area where Dmitry challenged the simple idea of what it means to sell something. A furniture company's job, he argued, does not finish when payment reaches the company's bank account. The furniture still needs to be delivered. Some products need assembly. Wooden tables may require treatment or finishing. Customers may later need after-sales support.
This is where another invisible business system appears: trust.
Brands often describe trust as something created through marketing. In practice, trust is frequently created through operations. A beautiful advertisement can create the initial promise, but the logistics team determines whether the product arrives when expected. The assembly team influences what the customer experiences once it reaches their home. Product quality determines what happens six months later. Customer service determines what happens when something goes wrong. What appears externally as "the brand" is therefore produced internally by a network of people and processes.
Dmitry reduced that entire system to a simple principle: businesses must keep their promises. What the company promises as a brand and what it ultimately delivers should not diverge. That sounds straightforward until one considers how many parts of an organisation have to work correctly for the promise to survive. The sales team can make the promise, but the factory, warehouse, delivery team, installers and customer-service staff may all determine whether it is kept.
Outdoor furniture makes that connection particularly visible because it is both a physical product and a service experience. A customer may spend considerable money creating an outdoor space and therefore expects more than the arrival of an object. They expect confidence that the product will work in the environment for which it was purchased and that the company will still exist if support is required afterwards.
That is also why businesses such as Joygarden cannot compete only through product selection. Furniture can increasingly be discovered online, compared across suppliers and viewed across dozens of websites before a customer ever speaks with a salesperson. What becomes harder to replicate is the accumulated system around the product: knowledge of customers, supplier relationships, fulfilment capability, after-sales service, reputation and the judgement developed after years of operating through different seasons.
Dmitry openly acknowledged that he did not begin his entrepreneurial journey with the philosophy he has today. The idea that his role was to create value in customers' lives emerged over time. This itself says something important about entrepreneurship. Businesses frequently begin with a product, an opportunity or a route to market. The deeper understanding of what customers are really buying develops through years of watching how they behave.
The history of Joygarden's name provides a small example of this evolution. Dmitry explained that the company initially operated as a subsidiary connected to a Chinese export business using the Joy Garden brand, meaning the name was inherited rather than created around the philosophy he later developed. Yet the name now fits remarkably well with a business whose founder describes his purpose in terms of improving the time people spend in gardens and outdoor spaces. Sometimes meaning develops around a brand after the name already exists.
When asked what he would tell someone beginning an entrepreneurial journey today, Dmitry returned to two ideas: courage and execution. Starting a company requires the willingness to jump into uncertainty, but courage alone does not create a functioning business. Entrepreneurs then have to deliver. Products have to reach the market. Promises have to be fulfilled. Work needs to happen with quality and speed.
Those two ideas can also be seen throughout the system behind Joygarden. Courage may begin the journey, but execution is what connects the showroom to the supplier, the supplier to the warehouse, the warehouse to the delivery vehicle and the final product to the customer's garden. A company can have excellent design, beautiful branding and ambitious ideas, but somewhere in the system someone still has to make sure the table arrives.
Outdoor living therefore provides a useful reminder of how much business activity hides behind ordinary objects. Look at a garden chair and it is easy to see furniture. Pull backwards and something much richer appears.
There is the customer's desire for a particular way of living. There is weather shaping when that desire turns into demand. There are seasonal sales patterns shaping inventory decisions. There are factories in other countries making products before many customers have even begun thinking about summer. There are global trading relationships connecting manufacturers and retailers. There are warehouses holding capital in physical form. There are logistics teams moving bulky products into people's homes. There are assembly, treatment and maintenance requirements after delivery. There are customer reviews shaping trust. There is the brand promise connecting every stage.
And eventually there is somebody sitting outside with family or friends, perhaps without thinking about any of those systems at all.
That may be the clearest sign that they have worked.
Dmitry's description of Joygarden as a company selling a way of life rather than simply furniture captures something that applies far beyond his own industry. Customers rarely purchase products solely because of what those products physically are. They purchase what those products allow them to do, feel or become. The companies that understand this begin looking beyond the visible transaction and towards the wider system creating the experience.
For Joygarden, the chair is the visible product.
The real business is everything that has to work around it before someone can sit down and enjoy the garden.
Watch the full Founder Conversation with Dmitry Sabelnikov of Joygarden on YouTube:
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