Remember the time when families would huddle together in furniture stores, choosing pieces for their home? When the head of the family would bombard the store-owner with questions while the ladies would check out the woodwork? Not to forget the children who would be jumping on the bed/couch to ensure its strength, as secretly instructed by their parents? Today, families still huddle over furniture, but only in front of their computers. Browsing, ordering and accepting delivery (as well as returning/exchanging) of furniture is now a matter of a few clicks—much to the delight of the entrepreneurs who run the online furniture stores.
The year 2012 seems to have been the Year of Online furniture. For that’s when India’s three biggest online furniture players, Pepperfry, FabFurnish, and UrbanLadder, went live. Pepperfry was founded in January 2012 by former eBay employees Ambareesh Murty and Ashish Shah. Two months later, Vikram Chopra and Mehul Agrawal co-founded FabFurnish. Ashish Goel moved to Bangalore in 2011 from Delhi where he was working with Amar Chitra Katha Media, and had a hard time finding furniture for his home. That’s when he decided to collate furniture from different vendors and sell it on a single online platform. He co-founded UrbanLadder with Rajiv Srivatsa in July 2012.
All the three sites source products from various merchants, SMEs and small offline players located across
the country. Once the furniture and decor pieces reach their warehouses, the team verifies them and loads their details and images online. In some cases, a photograph showing an actual room or kitchen setting is also put up for customers to better visualize the product. For delivery, the online stores partner with logistics companies or use their own fleet of vehicles. With less than 1-2 per cent return requests and competitive pricing, all three online stores have reached their break-even mark in just two years.
On the choice of starting online furniture stores, these entrepreneurs give us figures that point to a large, untapped market. “The home and furniture market in India is worth $20 billion. Surprisingly, there’s a huge gap when it comes to demand and supply. This prompted a lot of us to tap into this business,” says FabFurnish’s Chopra, who earlier worked as an investment analyst with Sequoia Capital and McKinsey & Company. These sites however do not rely only on furniture and have expanded their inventory to other categories such as décor products, garden add-ons, kitchenware, luggage, lighting, electronic items, and pet supplies.
While these stores mostly work as curated shops, PepperFry also has an in-house furniture range called Mudra. This is manufactured at its unit in Mumbai. UrbanLadder, meanwhile, sources its products from manufacturers in Rajasthan, Bangalore, Chennai and Delhi as well as imports items from Malaysia, China and Indonesia.
Pepperfry.com says it sells 55,000 products annually. “We source from more than 1,000 merchants, and offer free shipping for all furniture,” Murthy says. Under its ‘Last Mile Delivery’ programme, the store has its own fleet of vehicles but also works with logistics partners like Bluedart, Gati and Safexpress to reach far flung areas like the north-eastern states and bring shipping time down to 3-8 days.
Does the success of these online stores point to the fact that the touch-and-feel aspect has lost its luster? “Six years back Indians didn’t buy books online. Four years back, they didn’t buy electronics online. Two years back they didn’t buy apparel online,” says Srivatsa, COO of UrbanLadder.com. He attributes it to the efforts made by them and their e-commerce peers on fixing trust issues supply chain problems. It took just two-year span for the online home decor and furniture sector to become worth a few hundred crores. Indians are much more comfortable with the online medium now.
However, FabFurnish doesn’t mind the offline drill and also has experiential stores in Gurgaon, Bangalore and Faridabad. “These are not sales points; they give customers a touch and feel experience and help build trust,” Chopra explains. In time, the company also plans to open franchise stores in Pune, Hyderabad, Noida, Delhi and Chennai.