Redoing your home or office? Looking for something interesting, slightly different, somewhat evocative of your personality but without breaking the bank? FabFurnish will solve all your design conundrums. The company was founded by Vikram Chopra and Mehul Agrawal. FabFurnish.com was brought to India by the German incubator Rocket Internet.
It all started when Chopra and Agrawal dug into the not-so-organised Indian furniture market to come up with a rather fruitful invention. The founders realised the fast-growing rate of this $20 billion market which was mainly unorganised and had a lot of untapped potential. They wanted to simplify the purchase process of the Indian home and furniture market by bringing in high quality designer products at affordable prices, all of it which was lacking till now. This was a welcoming opportunity for FabFurnish.com to enter this segment and therefore, in March 2012 the two of them started the e-commerce firm with a vision to help consumers create beautiful homes in affordable budgets.
Chopra is an alumnus of IIT Bombay, and studied MBA at The Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania), and has previously worked with McKinsey & Company and Sequoia Capital. Mehul is a Silver Medalist from the prestigious Indian Institute of Management-Calcutta and worked at Morgan Stanley and The Boston Consulting Group.
Due to the lack of organised brands of scale and repute, the experience of setting up home is a painful one—right from identifying where you could get quality and designs, to being able to trust the merchant, to finding inspirations and ideas. We saw this as a big opportunity to tap and hence, FabFurnish.com was started.
“We are a dedicated online shopping destination for designer furniture, furnishings, décor items and kitchenware,” says Vikram. Today FabFurnish is one of India’s largest online home stores with a wide range of more than 100,000 assorted home furniture, furnishings, décor and kitchenware from 500+ Indian and international brands as well as its own private label. Some of the brands on board with us are Ogawa, Laz-Z-Boy, Lodge, Espirit, Joseph Joseph, Alex Daisy, Style Spa, Portico, Hometown, @Home, Spacewood, Disney, Dexas and Durian.
FabFurnish.com is a mix of marketplace and inventory model. “While some of the products are sourced from brands and stored in our warehouses, the onus of facilitating the process of delivery, customer service, and returns (if any) in the marketplace model is on us,” says Vikram. FabFurnish.com makes sure that its customers get the best delivery experience, regardless of the item they place an order on.
In the last three years, the company has worked hard and carved its way among the top e-firms in India. “Our business has been scaling by 3-4 fold annually since inception. Last year, we generated a turnover of `220 crore. By this end of December, we plan to achieve a turnover of `600 crore,” says Vikram. The company has also won many accolades along the way. Indian Home Congress & Awards declared FabFurnish.com as the ‘E-Retailer in India’ in home category in the year 2012. In 2014, FabFurnish.com was awarded ‘Home & Lifestyle eRetailer of the Year, 2014’ at the Indian eRetail Awards. FabFurnish.com was acknowledged as one of the Red Herring Top 100 Asia in the year 2014.
Interestingly enough, FabFurnish has four showrooms in India—one each in Gurgaon and Faridabad, and two in Bangalore. The company has a team of designers, curators and buyers who make regular trips within India and outside, to Europe, Turkey, Brazil, Vietnam, Malaysia, etc. for the latest trends, styles and designs. “Our focus remains on curating a diverse and comprehensive collection which not only reflects chic and urban sensibilities but also provides value for money to our customers,” says Vikram.
In March 2015, FabFurnish.com launched its specialised logistics service called Fabone which is available in Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, Faridabad, Mumbai, Pune and Bengaluru. Fabone offers special services where customers can avail of free expert assembly, open delivery, on-the-spot product demos and accurate package tracking.
FabFurnish.com has aggressive plans to expand the number of offline stores and to push its private labels as part of its brand building exercise. “Our main aim is to make our brands available to a bigger chunk of consumers through this,” says Vikram.
As far as Fabone is concerned, the company is planning to open in 20 more locations by the year-end for which it will expand the employee strength to 500-1,000 by the year-end. “Our next television commercial is also in the pipeline. We are working towards releasing the third edition of our quarterly décor magazine —Fab Living,” says Vikram. Log on to FabFurnish.com and start shopping.