Online stores build furniture — and trust
More than just adding more home furnishings products to the market, online home-furnishings companies such as Casper.com, Article. com and Wayfair.ca say they’re offering a completely different home furnishings experience to the traditional showroom model. “You go into a showroom on a typical day, and it does feel a bit like a ghost town,” says Article co-founder, director and chief executive Aamir Baig. “It’s a really expensive piece of real estate, typically two people in a room, and that’s it. Every now and then, maybe two or three customers, or a few, depending on how popular the store is. It just feels like an awful waste of time, space and energy.”
Baig and his three co-founders — all software engineers — launched Article.com in 2014, based on the Japanese principle of “muda” (elimination of waste).
“The website is probably the tip of the iceberg,” he says. “Behind it, all the systems and processes, from the way we design, manufacture and ship, to the way we warehouse to the way we get it to the consumer’s home, follows the same theme of simplicity and efficiency, with a meticulous focus on customer experience and eliminating everything that we think is wasteful.”
The company has its headquarters in Vancouver, with warehouses also in Seattle, Los Angeles and New Jersey. It currently delivers around 10,000 pieces of furniture a month, and its annual revenue is around $120 million.
Included in the company’s streamlined approach, Baig says, is the $49 flat fee for delivery on any order across the continental U.S. and Canada (with some exceptions, such as Yukon and Nunavut). The furniture and decor is contemporary in style, often described as mid-century or Scandinavian inspired, though Baig says they’re not tied down to any one design style. “Fundamentally, we consider ourselves committed to designing a better home-furnishing experience,” he says.
New York-based Casper.com launched in 2014, with only one product — an “obsessively engineered mattress” — and made an immediate impression on the home-furnishings industry, says Nicole Tapscott, general manager of Casper Canada.
“In our first month, we did a million dollars in sales,” she says. “So there was clearly a niche opportunity. In the first year, we did $100 million, in the second year we did $200 million, so we’ve managed to double sales consistently in the two and a half years that we’ve been live, and the Canadian market has been growing like gangbusters.”
Much like Article, the (five) Casper founders felt there was a need to get away from the showroom model in home furnishings, Tapscott says.
“We’ve all had the exact same experience,” Tapscott says, “where you go in, and you test out 10 to 15 different mattresses, for two minutes a mattress, while some kind of commission-driven salesperson leers over you, and you always end up spending more money than you want, and end up leaving the store with what you think might be the best mattress for you, but you’ve never actually tried it, you’ve never slept on it.”
In contrast to this, she says, Casper customers order online, have 100 days to test out their mattress (with free delivery and return) and it’s delivered in a box that’s “about the size of a mini fridge, so you can get around the tight corners of condos and homes (in) any large city.”
The company has since expanded its product line to include a “perfect pillow,” sheets, a box spring, bed frame and dog mattress, says Tapscott, and although 99 per cent of its business is through online sales, it is now stocking West Elm mattresses across the U.S., and, as of last month, in Toronto.