Startup Idea: The Best Way to Buy Furniture – Would You Use This?
homehub.co
homehub.co
Unfortunately, while I'm a big fan of browsing for furniture online, I wouldn't buy anything more substantial than a bookshelf online. I don't buy furniture terribly often, so when I do, I look for things that are going to last and that I won't regret in six months. Consequently, I like to see/touch the fabric, look at the stitching, and generally take a good look before I make a buying decision. So, while I'd traffic your site, I don't think you'd ever make any money off of me. I'm not one to tweet out links to products on shopping sites, or even like many things on Facebook, so to top it off, I'd be a viral dud. :)
However, I'm just one perspective and I may not be your target, so don't put extraordinary amounts of faith in my opinion. Congratulations for going this far, plus front paging Hacker News, and best of luck with your idea!
We do have a choice when it comes to buying furniture.
If you're going to go class warfare and ageism, at least do it right.
I might live in an area where furniture galleries are few and far between, and maybe I don't have a vehicle able to move anything larger than a small end table in the box.
I might have a friend whose place is completely decked out in furniture from these vendors, and she invites me over to a party, like tupperware or certain unmentionable things are sold.
You cater to a very specific group with high margin boutique furniture that is not available anywhere else but is nonetheless highly desirable.
Reasons I would not:
Furniture is like apparel and shoes; you can't describe an individual fit or feel over the internet all that well; that's why shopping malls stay in business and Amazon does much better selling coffee table books than coffee tables.
Try though you may, you would have to reach an economy of scale eclipsing a percentage of IKEA or Wal-mart to leverage the savings from not needing a physical showroom. IKEA thrives in spite of (and arguably because of) having really crappy delivery infrastructure, because non-crappy deliveries would blow anybody's margins.
What would really impress me is a self-assembling furniture kit, including 3-D printer/sewer, and all the raw materials to make it work. It may require a $10k deposit on a $40 chair, and require me to devote 6 hours of my labor, but I think that'd be an entertaining (and potentially quite profitable) alternative. Now to figure out how to make wood come out of a 3-D printer nozzle.
You might enjoy fine woodworking as a hobby.
I don't have the woodturning and wood carving gear to be able to spend 6 hours on a chair.
A large amount of time is spent in tool setup / teardown so I have built 3 bookcases in only about 10% more time than 1. This has some interesting implications for your dining room chair example, where it might be 6 hours to make one chair, but only 8 hours to make six chairs. Bolt together particle board kits usually scale much more linearly.
Extensive product evaluation leads me to estimate if you buy raw stock and cut it yourself you can upgrade about 1 to 2 levels of luxury. So buy a kit of particle board, or buy boards of solid clear oak, for the same cost. This is an issue for your proposed kit idea.
There is some competition on the high end here from One King's Lane and others, but I also noticed that under the 'baller' section you still have the max cost at 2500. Custom or really beautiful furniture like Thomas Moser costs significantly more than that.
One thing I've thought of on my way home from IKEA trips getting furniture for my startup was how great it would be if there could be a better IKEA delivery service. Currently, they charge $100 to ship anything anywhere - hooking in per-mile shipping for a reasonable rate would be a lucrative way to eliminate the tedious task of buying furniture from a store. This doesn't necessarily have to be limited to IKEA - if you partnered up with an array of furniture stores, offered them on your website, and had a bootstrapped delivery service, this could become a really big thing.
But then again, adding in shipping is risky and would really only work when there is a critical mass on the website. Best of luck to you!
Hipmunk - meta searches multiple travel sites, provides ratings and reviews, assigns an overall experience metric, and supplies other actionable info for travelers.
Pinterest - allows discovery and sharing of content and other interaction (BTW, unless they recently restarted their affiliate-monetization scheme, they no longer are "just an affiliate". I have no idea though).
I'll grant you that at some level anything is "just" an x. I'll also grant you that the determination of value is frequently subjective (for instance, I never got the fanaticism around Pinterest).
But, there is some point at which the added functionality/feature set of a given thing is so thin that it is very difficult to see where any significant value is being added or that there is any uniqueness. Aggregating products from different retailers? That's been done in spades.
The other element, I think, is that HN has a different standard. Because its readership is very highly tech and startup oriented, people who show here generally have something that is at least somewhat more unique. So, I don't think it's overly harsh for a reader to comment that he/she doesn't see anything unique or particularly valuable in this offering. In fact, that's pretty good feedback. The affiliate world is brutal and if this is all they are bringing, then they are likely to find it extremely tough going.
I also like the grouping of items based on cost range, as that was how I was primarily searching for stuff.
The only place it falls apart for me is in the ability to create a shopping cart. I may be in the minority, but when I was furniture shopping I was looking for a whole room or set of things. With this site, it's very easy to buy one thing, but when you want to buy 3 or 4 pieces it can become a bit of a hassle.
It wasn't that long ago that I was looking for a coffee table; I browsed through the websites of several of the brands you're scraping and found absolutely nothing. I ended up wandering to the local Dania showroom and found this gorgeous thing made out of two pieces of glass cut into Googieish boomerang shapes, that was only like $250.
Then again I am pretty sure I'm not the typical furniture consumer; I'm an artist, who has very little furniture, and a very specific vision for what she wants her home to look like.
I like it.
I also noticed you guys are up in Toronto (my original hometown). If you want more candid feedback from someone in the market for furniture, or if I can help with anything else silicon valley related (I live in SF). Let me know.
Baller should be
http://www.hudsonfurnitureinc.com http://bocci.ca Herman Miller Skram Maybe even room and board.
Know the market better and you will have better success.
Other then that I think its a great start.
Also, have you seen the numbers on big ticket furniture items bought online? Check out Wayfair's data. They're incredibly low so I doubt you can make enough money just through affiliate programs.
Admittedly, she has number of serious sites that she looks at regularly. Two of our most prized furniture possessions she scared up on Ebay.
Buying furniture and fitting them into right category/color and also fitting them into the color/style of your apartment are no easy task.
It takes lots of effort, and does not seem to work at all.
The most annoying part of it is that, there are no good tool for a general public to actually easily use planning tool to design/shop furnitures.
Since good furnitures are mostly quite expensive, there should be a good market fit, and if this is done right, it could be a really nice thing.
Just being a e-commerce site might not be so cool. But giving the ability for the users to compare/design/see the real actions in real time will be the features I would like to use.
It looks great, I might need something like this soon, and I can grit my teeth and carry on past the word "baller".
But I''m in the UK not USA.
What if we gave you an organization/collaboration feature where you could also save items you like, organize them by item type, tie them to a budget, collaborate with others to decide or get help with design. The idea, is that we are with you through every step of the process.
Would that make you more inclined to buy through us?
Maybe you should focus on only presenting the furniture. That would make the site a kind of ad where selers pay to display their products. Or maybe you should just focus on people that are not like me.
Your problem is, I only need to buy furniture once every few years, and even then only a few items - refurnishing a whole room or a house happens maybe once a decade.