jayreno

Present you is happier to only pay $40/month rather than $500-600 up front.

The hassle of selling used furniture should not be taken lightly, both in it's complexity and its sale price. Items on Craigslist, sold 12 months after purchase, go for 15-20% of retail value.

Awesome, glad to see this resonate. Where are you generally moving to/from? Inter- or intra-city moves?

Re differentiators: reasonable question, for sure. Check my reply to Charia above.

Re established market: interestingly, Cort and most other rental cos don't have a very good hold on the direct to consumer rental market. They are primarily focused on B2B rentals. Their brands and experiences are under the weather and don't appeal to our target market of younger people who move a lot. There's a new breed of successful companies cropping up that simply refresh the experience and tailor it to the way people live and interact today.

Good idea. Possible we are looking too mass market at the moment. Will keep this in mind.

Not much more. If the apartment is way up a walkup and we're carrying 4 dressers, 4 tables, 4 armoires, etc, we'll generally change the $99 delivery fee to $149.

Re damage: if you break something, we charge the cost of fixing the item. Since it's different for each item (ie. a small cut in the sofa vs reupholstering an entire sofa that had a bottle of wine spilled on it), it's difficult for us to explicitly state how much it would cost us for each type of damage. But we could certainly try.

We see ourselves as competing more with "ownership" than anything else. To us, ownership of furniture (i.e. responsibility for big ticket items that tie you down) is the problem.

Our competitive advantage to financing options is just that: we remove ownership from the equation while still giving you the ability to pay monthly rather than a large lump sum.

1. Data is about split. We're seeing people use us for both inter- and intra-city moves.

2. Agreed, might be a bit biased. LMK if you find a different/better source.

3. Census, unfortunately no. But like above, equally curious to see if that data is easily accessible, and if so, would love to dive in.

The ~$100/month price is our 3 month price. So total cost to you to have either of those sofas is $300 vs the cost to buy them retail at $600, which excludes assembly.

Fire sales are easier said than done. Takes time to get real replies via craigslist, and often times you might forget to sell the item till days before you're moving, adding to the headache.

See my reply to koolba below.

Yes, rent-to-buy is something we recently starting working on. Many people have asked about this, and we agree it makes a LOT of sense for our customers to have that option at any point during their rental. We'll have more info on our site in the coming weeks, but until then, we'll gladly discuss details directly with you if you like.

Great point here. It's a bit counter intuitive, right, that Americans on the whole are moving less. To add some color:

-The majority of Americans that live in rural or somewhat suburban areas are most certainly (though anecdotally) bringing this number down. In cities, you'd expect this number to be much higher than 10%.

-This data point from article below is bit more telling of our target market. Please don't mind their incessant use of the term "millennials" - they know not what they do.

> "44% of millennials say they plan to move again in the next year." (http://blog.rent.com/the-millennial-generation-on-the-move/)

Yeah, it's kind of gross really. These guys prey on the inability of certain income-classes to get credit, obtain loans, etc. Rent-a-Center is the same way :(

Yep, totally. We've been approached by a number of real estate agents asking if we'll do staging. We're working on seeing of and how this might fit into our business model.

Happy to jump in here to talk about pricing, as it seems to be a big topic of conversation (and rightfully so).

- The $338 bed that you linked to is on a massive, one-time sale right now. I've refreshed the page several times and the price keeps changing. The manufacturer must be testing a bunch of things out - take a look. Let's leave that one example there for now.

- The Purchase Queen you linked to does look nearly identical to what we get from our manufacturer that must also sell to Wayfair. And the price on this item has shifted dramatically on Wayfair as well.

Seems you grabbed a particular item that doesn't favor us well in the rent vs buy equation. For the majority of our items: try the same comparison and let me know what you find.

Point here is, we should be more aware of the dynamically shifting prices of items on other sellers websites and re-price our items accordingly. Good catch, thanks.

We plan to differentiate ourselves by offering better quality items, a more modern storefront/interface, a superior customer experience with top notch support, and most importantly, better pricing (we know it's not perfect for every item yet, but our prices are getting better as we grow).

Agreed - scrapping furniture just because you're moving is not a great idea. This will, however, occur often when we buy IKEA furniture (or items of that quality level) that we often have to trash items, or are actually trashed accidentally during a move (think one of their flimsy dressers or wardrobes).

It's a wasteful practice, and an important part of our mission is to keep furniture out of the landfills. That starts by getting as many uses out of the furniture that we can, before it stops working for us, either visually or functionally.

Yep, it's difficult to find fully furnished apartments in a number of cities, especially at a reasonable price. Oftentimes landlords will put significant premiums on apartments they have fully furnished and keep that margin for themselves. If you rent from someone like us, you don't have to pay that premium, and get the added benefit of picking what items you'd like.

We're also partnering with property managers and real estate cos in NYC to help them furnish their units. It seems to be resonating well with them to not have to pay thousands of dollars up front for furniture, and instead can make monthly once their rent checks come in. Helps them with cashflow.

That's exactly what we're working on now. we should have more information about rent-to-buy options on our site soon, but in the meantime we're discussing it directly with anyone who might be interested in this.

All great points re Feather vs Cort. To add to the conversation, we see ourselves as different from Cort in 2 key areas:

1) Price: compare our prices and, across the board, you'll find we beat them in every category, for every rental length. True, it's not a long-term strategy of ours. But the reason neither you or I are renting our furniture from CORT today is that their prices are above what we'd be willing to pay for a 12 months lease. 2) Style: the overwhelming majority of their furniture is bland, and as one of our customers put it, "my parent's furniture". Our style is strictly mid-century modern and slightly modern, and designed to appeal to a younger demo.

Cort's main business is going after government and corporate relocation budgets. We are focused more heavily on the larger market, servicing consumers who are moving frequently (i.e. every year or so).

Well, you're right - it's not "new". Rent-a-Center has been around since the 70s, but are completely predatory, offering lease to own options that gauge customers (ie. a $700 sofa will cost the customer $2100 after 2 years of payments, and will repo if they miss a payment)

We consider Feather "kind of new" because renting furniture it's not a habit that most people are used to. In fact, 97% of the US owns and deals with their furniture. So we think of ourselves as new in that sense :)

Thanks for the thoughts! Curious to hear what type of furniture you would be purchasing that would break even to our furniture at 3 months?

The breakeven price for our customers is always longer than the total price of the rental. Wonder if we should be explicitly stating this on our site?

You're exactly right. There are a number of other costs associated with getting the furniture, assembly, and selling or scrapping costs that are sometimes difficult to quantify.

Wondering how y'all think we should be communicating this to our customers? Thanks!