We just bought our first home for $289,000 in Bishopdale, Nelson.

The year is 2009. The house is rough.

A real doer-upper.

Every surface needed TLC - especially the walls which looked they’d been attacked by a giant echidna. 

While I focused on the 63,000 holes that had to be filled and sanded - Rebekah was picturing how good it could look and went hunting for the perfect wallpaper.

It turned out that perfect design was called Mambo which she found in a sample book at the local decorator store. 

We saved up for a month and ordered it - only to get a call 6 weeks later from the store saying they were cancelling our order because they couldn’t source the paper.

Gutted. 

They said we could choose something else and wait another 6 weeks or paint.

Instead Rebekah reached out to the manufacturer, Holden Décor, in the UK and was able to source it directly from them. But it wasn’t just Mambo.  They had books full of other awesome designs that weren’t available in New Zealand. 

We loved them so much we started to bring them in for friends and family.  Then friends of friends.  And before we knew it, we were ‘The Wallpaper People’ selling direct to people all over the country through our online store. 

It’s now 16 years later and wallpaper has become a way of life for us. 

We’ve dispatched 25,000+ orders, re-built our website 4 times, opened a warehouse and showroom, and expanded our range to include wallpapers from manufacturers across Europe. 

We also print out own designs too – which we reckon is pretty cool!

A lot has changed over the years.  But the foundation of the business has stayed the same – bringing awesome wallpapers to New Zealanders, at New Zealand’s best prices.

Rebekah and I are still the heart and soul of daily operations, and we’re still in love with wallpaper as much as we were the day those first rolls of Mambo arrived at that house.

Looking back, there only one thing we’d do differently.

If we’d know we were going to be around this long, we would’ve come up with a better name for the business than ‘The Inside’ – but it seemed cute at the time and it has well and truly stuck now.

So that’s it. We’re The Inside.

Aka the wallpaper people.