Furniture, appliances and interior equipment adds life to any space be it home/ office/ gym or restaurant. These units besides keeping space organized, makes our lives easy and efficient. However, owning high quality, well designed, highly efficient furniture and appliances could cost you heavens. Solving this issue is a Gurugram based startup, CityFurnish. With CityFurnish, one can own high quality furniture and appliances based on affordable rental subscriptions, rather than spending a fortune on buying them. CityFurnish provides a wide array of products within the domain of furniture and appliances on rental subscription. Here is a how CityFurnish is making a mark for itself in the Indian furniture rental Industry.
Read about CityFurnish Founders, Competitors, Growth, Funding, Business Model, Revenue, Awards etc.,
CityFurnish Highlights
| Startup Name | CityFurnish |
|---|---|
| Headquarter | Gurugram |
| Sector | Online Furniture and Appliances Rental Subscription |
| Co-Founders | Neerav Jain , Saurabh Gupta |
| Founded | 2015 |
| Parent Organization | CityFurnish India Pvt Ltd. |
| Website | cityfurnish.com |
About CityFurnish and How it Works
Furniture and Appliances Industry Details
Founders of CityFurnish and team
How was CityFurnish Started
CityFurnish - Name, Tagline, and Logo
CityFurnish - Business Model and Revenue Model
CityFurnish - User Acquisition
CityFurnish - Startup Challenges
CityFurnish - Funding and Investors
CityFurnish - Advisors and Mentors
CityFurnish - Awards
CityFurnish - Competitors
CityFurnish - Future Plans
About CityFurnish and How it Works
CityFurnish (CityFurnish India Pvt Ltd.) provides products ranging from furniture, furnishings, consumer appliances and fitness equipment on rental subscription. Besides offering high quality rental products for residential purpose, the company also has an accelerating presence into the commercial and hospitality segments
CityFurnish's vision is to be a benchmark in the country’s Furniture Rental Industry. The brand is currently servicing Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Pune, Gurgaon,Ghaziabad/Noida and Hyderabad. CityFurnish is aiming to expand its business in 15 cities by 2020.
The key focus area for CityFurnish founder, Neerav Jain is to drive the Company towards growth by way of strengthening the brand and by leveraging upon inherent strengths of the business, offering a one stop solution to customers for their complete furniture and furnishing needs.
This is how CityFurnish Works-
- Customers can choose from the variety of products, packages and add-ons available, if there is no package catering to your needs; one can make one's own package by adding the individual items in one's cart.
- Customers need to make the advance payment for one month and provide some documents for the KYC process.
- Once the payment is done and documents are provided, the products will be dispatched within a period of maximum 72 hour.
CityFurnish is revolutionizing the furniture industry by providing quality furniture and home appliances on easy monthly rental. Renting furniture is the new way to live, and is easy on the pocket. Other benefits of renting furniture being that, one doesn't need to be stuck with the same old furniture for years and hence, get a chance to renovate the home quite often, as and when one desires. One can change the furniture according to their needs and not even have to deal with the hassle of buying/selling, shifting and relocating.
CityFurnish's products are crafted in their own state of the art manufacturing facility based in Rajasthan and are thoughtfully designed to provide utmost comfort.
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Furniture and Appliances Industry Details
The Indian Furniture Market is anticipated to register a CAGR of 13.38% during the forecast period i.e. 2018-2023. The market is expected to reach USD 61.09 Billion by the end of 2023. Further, the India furniture market is anticipated to achieve a Y-o-Y growth rate of 14.30% in 2023 as compared to the previous year.
The technological advancements such as availability of high speed internet networks such as 4G and spiked absorption of smart gadgets is boosting the e-retail sector in India. These advancements further provide ease to the customers to buy furniture through online channels. Additionally, the growing online furniture selling companies are creating great boost to the furniture industry.
While, the total furniture market is $20 billion and growing at 15% YoY, Rental market currently is valued at $6b in India. The team at CityFurnish estimates that in the next five years the total market for rental furniture would be above $20b in India.
Founders of CityFurnish and team
Neerav Jain is the founder and CEO of CityFurnish. In a career spanning 3 years, Neerav worked in various key positions at Climpex Furniture and his family business Chandra shekhar Exports before founding CityFurnish. Neerav has extensive experience in furniture industry in managing sales, marketing and Business management (B2B and B2C) and formulating strategies for growth with an overall business perspective.
Saurabh Gupta, is the co-founder and CTO of CityFurnish. He completed his M.Tech from IIT Roorkee. Before joining Neerav Jain as the Co- founder at CityFurnish he worked with Vodafone and Amdocs and has experience spanning 10 years. Saurabh is a skilled technology professional and possess expertise in digital marketing.
Currently CityFurnish has a team of 100+ member across 7 cities. Work culture is value driven to provide value to their customers. At present, they are hiring aggressively and aims to have 200+ staff by end of 2020.
How was CityFurnish Started
Neerav hails from a family of furniture-makers in Jodhpur, and thus he had a fair idea about the furniture market. One thought- which is the absence of an alternative to buying expensive furniture for short term has struck Neerav and has not left him until he finally established, CityFurnish. He along with his team has conducted, 200+ interviews to validate the idea. Receiving positive response, CityFurnish took the shape of reality.
When we started, almost 99 percent of people in India bought furniture. Renting and subscription was a very niche category because it was looked down upon as a compromise on either product or service. We were trying to change that perception and influence user behavior. We did not want our customers to feel inferior for renting furniture- said CityFurnish founder Neerav Jain
Neerav wanted to explore the rentals space that had picked up in India. Mainly, with the increasing salaried young adults living away from their hometowns and moving houses regularly. For such individuals who are constantly on the move, owning the necessary furniture like beds, sofas, tables not only costs high on their pockets but also makes city-hopping harder. Hence, to encash upon such population of the community, Neerav worked upon creating a platform for rented furniture.
When we started, we were more focused on acquiring customers. Now, we want to retain more. So, we are offering a 30-40 percent price benefit to renewing customers. We have also launched a free relocation service for customers who are moving cities in the middle of their subscriptions.
CityFurnish started with just 50 rentals (or subscriptions) in Gurugram. Since then, the startup has grown to about 12,000+ live subscriptions in three years, with a presence in Delhi-NCR, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Pune, Gurgaon, Ghaziabad / Noida and Hyderabad.. It has also set up 8 fulfillment centers in 7 cities. CityFurnish offers furniture for a minimum rental tenure of 3 months. As the tenure increase, the rental per month reduces, to make it affordable for user in long run.
CityFurnish - Name, Tagline and Logo
The name CityFurnish intends to highlight the company's prime target audience along with the core service they are providing. It also stands for the commitment of the team at CityFurnish to furnish any city for their users – hassle free and affordably.
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CityFurnish - Business Model and Revenue Model
Initially, CityFurnish followed hotel booking model. This model included asking people for a start date and an end date for renting. As a result, most of the users subscribed for a short period. Now, they have moved to a Netflix-style subscription model, and that has helped them increase customer retention from 35 percent to more than 52 percent.
CityFurnish has packages suiting wide sections of the community ranging from students, family to corporate setup. These packages are priced on the basis of monthly subscriptions. The basic package starts at Rs. 900/month and goes up to Rs 4500/month.
The unique feature about CityFurnish that sets it apart from its competitors is their end-to end services. Besides designing and manufacturing its own premium furniture, CityFurnish, unlike many of its peers also controls the end-to-end value chain from product sourcing to fulfillment and delivery. It even services installation and maintenance requests from customers.
“We not only have in-house designers and manufacturers, but our team also provides the ‘wow’ factor for customers. For instance, our delivery boys will roll out the dining mats or tuck in the bedsheets. There is no third party involved, and we control the entire user experience.”
A premium service comes at a premium cost, of course. An average monthly subscription for a 2BHK flat costs about Rs 4,000-5,000 on CityFurnish. However, prices fluctuate city-wise due to regional factors.
Home furniture accounts for over 60 percent of CityFurnish’s subscriptions. Since recently, its commercial customers have been growing with shared workspaces gaining ground in India. Its current clientele consists of large corporates like Toyota, Indian Oil, and Samsung, as well as local startups
CityFurnish - User Acquisition
For the first 100 customers CityFurnish has used techniques like interview at metros and office hubs, expat meets, broker channel etc. Later on, they have adopted broker tie ups; referral marketing; expat Partnerships; relocation and moving company partnership as strategies to expand their scope and reach among their customers. Besides these strategies, CityFurnish also release coupons regularly to both retain their customers and get new customers.
CityFurnish - Startup Challenges
In India furniture market is pretty big. However, 90% of the buyers prefer offline shopping furniture due to trust deficit about the quality, which is a big challenge for any furniture renting startup. Nevertheless, Neerav's family legacy in furniture making and his experience in the domain has helped him to create sophisticated, elegant and quality furniture and thereby, provide CityFurnish customers a "superior experience".
At the service end, providing white glove delivery experience involved lot of operations challenges. However, CityFurnish was able to overcome the same by training and organizing workshops for its installation and delivery team.
CityFurnish - Funding and Investors
CityFurnish has raised a total funding of around $5.2 million till date. CityFurnish raised close to $600,000 from Times Group-owned Brand Capital, and a few undisclosed angels. CityFurnish also received $150,000 from Y-Combinator against 7 percent equity stake. In its latest round of funding, CityFurnish raised $5 million in June 2019. Here are details of funding received by CityFurnish.
| Date | Stage | Amount | Investor |
|---|---|---|---|
| June 2019 | Series A | $5m | Paul Buchheit, Soma Capital, Venture Highway, Steve Chen |
| March 2019 | Seed Round | $150K | Y Combinator |
| July 2016 | Seed Round | $600K | Brand Capital |
| December 2015 | Seed Round | - | - |
CityFurnish - Advisors and Mentors
CityFurnish by the virtue of its wide scale of operations and gaining popularity has the best of the market as their advisors and mentors. One of the prominent mentor include, Youtube Cofounder – Steve Chan, who is also one of the CityFurnish's investor.
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CityFurnish - Awards
Early in 2019, CityFurnish became one of the four Indian startups to be shortlisted by Y Combinator (the top see accelerator in the US) for a 12-week programme. Under the programme, in exchange of a 7 percent equity stake, CityFurnish gained mentorship, funding, and access to top investors in Silicon Valley.
CityFurnish - Competitors
In the furniture rental market the main competitors of CityFurnish are Furlenco and Rentomojo. Like any domain, it faces little competition from the unorganized sector side, which constitute players like Sab Rent Karo, Rent Macha and FlatFurnish among others.
Nevertheless, the team at CityFurnish is confident about their business having only growth in future. They believe that their unique amalgamation of technology and product which is entirely focused on fulfilling customer need, is what sets them apart. Since the startup manufactures and designs their furniture at their own facility in Jodhpur, it provides them tremendous advantage over their competitors. By having a controlling over the quality and cost of their products, the rental startup is able to manage inventory at more than 95 per cent efficiency than its major competitors and at the same time enable a faster collection of their payments.
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CityFurnish - Future Plans
With more sticky customers, revenues are looking up as well. CityFurnish claims that it has hit an ARR of $3 million and its revenues are increasing 100 percent year-on-year. Subscribers, meanwhile, are growing 20 percent month-on-month with a 3 percent churn (those who drop out).
CityFurnish has set a target of 70,000+ subscribers by 2021, with an ARR of $8 million. The company has achieved profitability and plans to double it's turnover by end of 2020.
As far as product range is concerned, the startup is planning to expand towards kids' furniture. At present, their product categories include home and office furniture, consumer durable and appliances, electronics, and fitness equipment. It will launch kids’ furniture shortly as it sees it as a prospective high-growth vertical.
“We see it as a perfect subscription category because kids tend to outgrow furniture every 1-2 years. Hence, it makes more sense to rent than to buy. We’re trying to bring depth and variety to it.”
For expansion along these lines, the startup aims to focus on the population of age group 24-38. CityFurnish plans to be the first firm in renting of furniture from India to start operation across the Globe.
Link : https://startuptalky.com/cityfurnish-success-story/
Author :- Chayanika Goswami
July 18, 2020 at 12:26PM
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