Our story — Meet Abdullahi
I came to Australia from Mogadishu in 2003, landed in Brisbane with not much more than a bag and a cousin's couch to sleep on. Within six months I was doing apprentice electrical work in Ipswich, and by 2008 I had my own small contracting business running three crews across south-east Queensland. Seventeen years on job sites teaches you a few things: what materials last, what falls apart after one wet season, and how to spot when something is built right versus built to look right. That eye for construction quality is basically the whole reason Brook Forth exists today.
The side gig started around 2019. I was fitting out a deck for a client in Toowoomba and they asked me to source some outdoor furniture while I was at it. I spent about three weeks calling around, looking at what was available locally, and kept finding the same problem: stuff that looked decent in the showroom but felt flimsy the moment you picked it up. I ended up ordering a small consignment direct from a supplier in Vietnam, about 340 kilograms of wicker and cast-iron pieces. The client was happy. Two neighbours asked where they got it. I started thinking.
The actual decision happened in March 2021. I was sitting in my ute outside a Bunnings in Caboolture, eating a sandwich, looking at a quote I'd just lost on price to a bigger firm. I called my wife Fadumo and said I think I'm done with electrical. She said she'd been waiting for me to figure that out. I spent the next four months winding down the contracting work, registered CLEANZIL PTY LTD, and started building out what became Brook Forth properly. We set up the warehouse and dispatch operation in Mount Gambier because the freight rates to Melbourne and Adelaide made sense, and Fadumo's sister already lived down there.
We're based in Mount Gambier now, operating out of a 420-square-metre shed off Jubilee Highway East. The range has grown to about 40 product lines and we ship to every state. I still check every new supplier personally, usually flying to inspect the factory before we commit to an order. Nothing gets listed on the site unless I'd put it in my own backyard and feel okay about it holding up through a Queensland summer or a Mount Gambier winter. That's the only standard I've got.
— Built it like I'd have to fix it myself. — Abdullahi, Abdullahi Mohamed
Journal
How we finally sorted the wicker sourcing problem
After three failed samples and one supplier who ghosted us entirely, we found something worth sticking with.
When I started Brook Forth I assumed sourcing outdoor wicker furniture would be the easy part. I was wrong. The first two suppliers I contacted through a trade directory sent samples that looked fine in photos but felt hollow when you sat in them, the kind of thing that would last one Mount Gambier winter before the joints started pulling apart. The third lot sent a quote, asked for a 40 percent deposit, then stopped replying to emails. I spent about four months going in circles before a contact pointed me toward a manufacturer working out of Shandong province who supplied a couple of mid-size Australian outdoor brands I actually respected.
I flew to Adelaide and caught a connecting flight to inspect the facility myself, which felt like overkill at the time but wasn't. The difference between that factory and the earlier ones was visible the moment I looked at how the resin wicker was wound around the aluminium frame. Tight, consistent, no gaps at the corners. They use a 5mm flat-weave PE rattan on the Sunhaven Wicker Lounge Set, which is thicker than most of what you see at the big box retailers. The frame underneath is powder-coated aluminium, not hollow steel, which matters a lot in coastal or high-humidity areas like the Limestone Coast.
What I didn't expect was how long the back-and-forth on cushion foam density would take. We went through six foam samples. The first four were either too soft or had that cheap bounce that tells you the foam will compress permanently within a season. We landed on a 28-density high-resilience foam with a Sunbrella-grade fabric outer, which added about $18 per seat to the landed cost but meant I could actually stand behind the product. That's not a small number when you're a small operation, but I've seen what happens to budget outdoor cushions after one summer in direct sun and I wasn't going to sell that.
The other thing I want to be honest about is lead times. When we placed our first order it was 14 weeks from deposit to the container arriving at Port Adelaide. That's a long time to have cash sitting on water. I've since built a buffer stock arrangement with a warehouse in Wingfield that helps, but if you're ordering a Sunhaven set and the website says 3 to 5 business days, that's because the stock is already here in South Australia. If it ever says pre-order, that means the container is on its way and I'll tell you exactly when it's due.
I still talk to that same manufacturer. They're not perfect, and there have been two batches where I've had to reject frames with surface rust spots under the powder coat. But they fix it without an argument, which in my experience is rarer than it should be. For now that relationship is working, and the Sunhaven set is the product I get the fewest complaints about, which is the only metric that really matters to me.
Getting the most out of your Harbour Light fire pit
A few things I learned from using ours through a Mount Gambier winter that the instruction sheet doesn't cover.
We've had a Harbour Light fire pit sitting on the back deck here in Mount Gambier since June, which means it's been through about 60 nights of actual use by now. Mount Gambier winters are not mild. We're talking 3 to 5 degree overnight lows, regular rain, and the kind of damp cold that comes off Blue Lake and settles into everything. I wanted to know what the fire pit was actually like to live with before I wrote anything about it, so I waited. Here's what I've worked out.
First thing: the mesh spark guard that comes with it is not decorative. I know some people leave it off because it looks cleaner without it, but we're in a region with a lot of dry grass paddocks and the wind here can shift quickly. Fit the guard. It sits on the lip of the bowl and takes about four seconds to place. The bowl itself is 3mm Corten steel, which means it will rust to that familiar orange-brown patina over the first season. That's normal and it's actually what protects the steel long term. If you want to slow the patina down, a light wipe of linseed oil on a dry day before the first use will do it.
For firewood, I've been using red gum sourced from a supplier near Penola, about 45 minutes north of here. Red gum burns hot, burns long, and doesn't spit nearly as much as some of the softwoods you'll find at servo firewood racks. A full load of split red gum in the Harbour Light bowl will give you around 2.5 to 3 hours of solid heat. I've tried using ironbark as well, which burns even longer, but it's harder to find split down here in the south-east. Whatever you use, buy it dry. Green or damp wood smokes badly and you'll spend the whole evening moving chairs.
The legs on the Harbour Light are adjustable to account for uneven ground, which I added specifically because my own deck has a slight slope and I was sick of fire pits that rocked. You'll need a 13mm spanner to set them. Spend two minutes doing it properly before the first use and you won't think about it again. The only maintenance I do between uses is tip out any ash once it's fully cold, which keeps the drainage holes at the base clear. If ash sits wet in the bowl for a week it accelerates surface corrosion on the interior, which doesn't affect function but looks rough.
One last thing I'll mention because a few people have asked: the Harbour Light is not designed for cooking, at least not in the traditional sense. You can get a grill grate that sits across the top if you want to toast bread or heat a camp pot, but if you want to actually cook meat over fire, the Summit Portable BBQ is a better tool for that. The fire pit is for sitting around, and it does that job well.
What a Tuesday afternoon looks like at Brook Forth
The operation is smaller than people imagine, and I think being honest about that is more useful than pretending otherwise.
I pack orders from a shed at the back of our property on Wehl Street. It's a 7 by 9 metre galvanised shed that used to store a trailer and a lot of old carpet offcuts from the previous owner. I cleared it out in early 2023, put down rubber matting, and set up racking along two walls. The racking holds flat-pack furniture boxes and hammock rolls. The fire pits sit on pallets on the floor. It's not glamorous but it works, and the rent is zero because it's my own shed, which is the kind of business logic I appreciate.
On a normal Tuesday I'll pick, pack, and label somewhere between 4 and 11 orders depending on the week. The Coastal Breeze Hammock is the fastest to process because it ships in a single bag that weighs about 2.4kg and fits in a standard satchel. The Sunhaven Wicker Lounge Set is the slowest because it's a multi-box freight order and I have to print a separate consignment note for each pallet. I use Sendle for the smaller parcels and a freight broker out of Adelaide for anything over 20kg. I've tried two other freight brokers and the one I'm with now is the only one who actually answers the phone when something goes sideways.
The thing that surprised me most when I started doing this full time was how much of the day is just admin. Responding to emails, chasing ETAs from the Wingfield warehouse, updating tracking numbers manually when the system doesn't pull them through correctly. I'd estimate that actual physical packing is maybe 35 percent of my working day. The rest is coordination and communication. Coming from a carpentry background where the work was physical and the outcome was visible, that took some adjusting to. I still prefer days when I'm in the shed with the roller door up.
December is the busiest month by a significant margin. Last December I shipped 94 orders, which doesn't sound like a lot until you factor in that half of them were freight and I was doing all of it myself. This December I've brought on a local woman named Carla who helps me three days a week, and that has made a measurable difference to my stress levels. She lives about 10 minutes away in Compton and already knew how to drive a pallet jack, which was not something I expected to be a hiring criterion but turned out to matter.
I'm not trying to scale this into a warehouse operation with a team of 20. That's not why I started it. What I want is a business that runs cleanly, ships what it promises, and doesn't leave me answering angry emails at 10pm. Most weeks it does that. Some weeks it doesn't, usually when freight delays stack up around public holidays. I find that telling people the truth about delays, early and directly, fixes most of the problem before it becomes one.
A long weekend with the Summit BBQ, Robe road trip
We took the Summit Portable BBQ to Robe for the Labour Day weekend and I paid more attention to it than anyone should on a holiday.
My family drove down to Robe for the Labour Day long weekend, which from Mount Gambier is about an hour and twenty minutes on the Princes Highway through Millicent. We stay at a friend's shack near the boat ramp, nothing fancy, and the cooking setup there is an old brick built-in that someone installed in the 1980s and hasn't been cleaned since. I brought the Summit Portable BBQ partly because I wanted to cook on something I trusted and partly, I'll admit, because I wanted to see how it handled a weekend of real use outside of my own backyard.
We cooked on it six times across three days. Saturday breakfast was bacon and eggs, Saturday night was King George whiting we bought off a boat at the Robe harbour for $18 a kilo, Sunday was lamb chops from a butcher in Penola we stopped at on the way down, and Monday morning was toast and more bacon because nobody had the energy to think. The Summit runs on a standard 4kg LPG cylinder, which lasted the full weekend with gas to spare. I'd estimate we had about 40 percent remaining when we packed up Monday afternoon.
The whiting was the real test. Fish on a portable BBQ usually ends in skin stuck to the grill and half the flesh left behind. I preheated the plate for about 8 minutes on medium-high before putting the fish on, and I'd rubbed the plate with a cut lemon before heating, which is something a commercial kitchen hand told me years ago and it actually works. The fish came off cleanly. That's not a miracle of engineering, it's just a flat cast iron plate that holds heat evenly, but not every portable BBQ has that. Some of the cheaper ones have thin steel plates that cool the moment food hits them.
One thing I noticed on this trip that I hadn't paid attention to before: the fold-out side shelf is more useful than it looks in the product photos. We had a small esky next to the BBQ and the shelf gave us somewhere to put a plate without putting it on the ground. It's not a large shelf, maybe 35cm wide, but on a shack deck with limited table space it got used constantly. The folding legs also handle uneven surfaces reasonably well. The Robe shack deck has a slight lean toward the fence and the BBQ sat stable without any shimming.
We were back in Mount Gambier by Monday afternoon and I cleaned the plate before I even unpacked the car, which is the kind of thing that happens when you sell something and feel personally responsible for its reputation. Warm water, a scraper, a light oil coat while the plate was still slightly warm. The whole thing took six minutes. Robe in late summer is worth the drive, and the King George whiting is worth every cent of that $18 a kilo.
Customer reviews
Sarah K. — Newtown, NSW — 2024-03-14 — 5/5
Solid lounge set, fast delivery
Ordered the Sunhaven Wicker Lounge Set on a Tuesday and it was on my doorstep by Friday — didn't expect that at all. Assembly was straightforward and the frame feels genuinely solid. We've had it outside through a few rainy days now and it's held up without any issues.
Tom R. — Brunswick, VIC — 2024-06-02 — 4/5
Great fire pit, minor packaging issue
The Harbour Light Fire Pit looks exactly like the photos and the powder coat finish is really clean. One corner of the box was crushed in transit but the pit itself was fine — no dents. Would be good if there was a bit more internal padding for something this heavy, but overall happy with the purchase.
Priya M. — Glenelg, SA — 2024-08-19 — 5/5
These lanterns are exactly what I was after
Bought three of the Terracotta Garden Lanterns for the back patio and they look great in the evening with tea lights in them. Shipping was fast — I'm in SA so I assumed it'd be quick given they're based in Mount Gambier, and it was. Good quality for the price.
Jake L. — West End, QLD — 2024-09-05 — 4/5
Hammock does what it says
The Coastal Breeze Hammock arrived well-packaged and the fabric is noticeably thicker than a cheap one I bought years ago. Setup took about 20 minutes with the included hardware. I'd have given five stars but the hanging straps could be a bit longer for awkward tree spacings.
Eloise B. — Fitzroy, VIC — 2024-11-22 — 5/5
Bought as a gift, recipient loved it
Ordered the Terracotta Garden Lanterns with the gift wrap option for a housewarming. The card message was printed neatly and the wrap was tidy — better than I expected for a $7 add-on. My friend sent me a photo straightaway when they arrived, which says enough.
Marcus D. — Manly, NSW — 2025-01-10 — 5/5
Summit BBQ is a proper portable unit
I've been through a few portable BBQs over the years and most are flimsy. The Summit Portable BBQ feels like it'll actually last — the grill grate is heavy gauge and the legs lock properly. Used it twice at the beach already. Delivery was quicker than the estimated window too.
Nadia F. — Hobart, TAS — 2025-02-28 — 4/5
Good lounge set, cushions run a little small
Really happy with the overall build of the Sunhaven Wicker Lounge Set — it's sturdy and looks good on the deck. My only note is that the seat cushions are a little narrower than I expected based on the photos, so worth checking the listed dimensions before you order. Shipping to Hobart was about six business days which is fair.
Callum P. — New Farm, QLD — 2025-04-03 — 5/5
Fire pit arrived in perfect condition
The Harbour Light Fire Pit was well-packed — double-boxed with foam inserts — and arrived without a scratch. It's a good size for a small group, and the mesh spark guard is a nice inclusion. I emailed Brook Forth with a question before ordering and got a reply the same afternoon.
Shipping
Brook Forth ships Australia-wide from our workshop in Mount Gambier, SA. Standard orders go out via Australia Post and typically arrive within 3–8 business days for metro addresses. Regional and remote postcodes should allow 5–12 business days. If you need something sooner, select StarTrack Express at checkout — most capital city deliveries land within 1–3 business days. Orders placed before 2pm AEST Monday to Friday are dispatched the same day. Free standard shipping applies automatically to all orders over $120 AUD. Below that threshold, a flat shipping rate is calculated at checkout based on your postcode and the dimensions of your items.
All prices on the Brook Forth website are displayed in Australian dollars and include GST. No additional tax is added at checkout. We pack orders carefully to account for the size and weight of our products — larger items like the Sunhaven Wicker Lounge Set and Harbour Light Fire Pit are double-boxed with internal foam or cardboard bracing. Smaller items like the Terracotta Garden Lanterns are individually wrapped before boxing. You'll receive a dispatch confirmation email with tracking details as soon as your order leaves our workshop. Use that tracking number directly on the Australia Post or StarTrack website for live updates.
If your order arrives damaged, don't panic. Take clear photos of the outer packaging and the item itself before doing anything else, then email us at hello@brookforth.com.au with your order number and the photos attached. We'll assess the damage and either send a replacement or issue a refund — whichever you prefer — within 3 business days of hearing from you. We take responsibility for damage that occurs in transit and won't ask you to lodge a claim with the carrier yourself. For remote NT, WA, and TAS locations, delivery windows can occasionally extend beyond the standard estimates during peak periods; we'll always update you if there's a known delay.
Returns
You have 30 days from the date your order is delivered to request a return. To be eligible, the item needs to be unused and in its original condition — packaging intact where possible. To start a return, email hello@brookforth.com.au with your order number and the reason for the return. We'll confirm eligibility and send you a return authorisation within 2 business days. Change-of-mind returns are accepted within this window, but the cost of return shipping is the customer's responsibility unless the item is faulty or was sent incorrectly.
Your rights under the Australian Consumer Law apply to every purchase from Brook Forth, regardless of our standard return window. If a product has a major fault — meaning it doesn't do what it's supposed to do, is unsafe, or differs significantly from its description — you're entitled to a refund, replacement, or repair. You don't need to return the item in its original packaging to exercise these rights, and we won't ask you to. Minor faults will be assessed on a case-by-case basis and we'll offer a repair, replacement, or partial refund as appropriate. These rights sit alongside and do not limit our 30-day change-of-mind policy.
Once we receive your returned item and confirm it meets the return conditions, refunds are processed within 5 business days. The refund goes back to your original payment method — credit card, PayPal, or Afterpay depending on how you paid. Afterpay refunds follow Afterpay's standard processing timeline which can take an additional 3–5 business days on their end. We don't offer store credit in place of a refund unless you specifically request it. Items that have been assembled and used outdoors, or that show signs of weather exposure, are not eligible for a change-of-mind return. If you're unsure whether your item qualifies, just get in touch before sending anything back.