Buying furniture online will become part of life, says Urban Ladder CEO

Urban Ladder came into limelight last year, when Tata Sons' Chairman Emeritus Ratan Tata invested an undisclosed amount in the company. Since then, the Bangalore-based company is beefing up its logistics and product catalogue. In a conversation with Business Today's Manu Kaushik, Ashish Goel, Founder & CEO of Urban Ladder, talks about the opportunities in the online furniture market.

Q- Tell us about Urban Ladder and its future plans.

A- We launched in August 2012, about eight months after Pepperfry and five months after FabFurnish and Zansaar had launched. In the last 12 months, we have grown five times. We have been consistent. We are focused on the product because we believe that product is the real differentiator in this category. The problem is not the competition between vertical players. One needs to worry about the competition coming from Amazon, Snapdeal or Flipkart who already have roughly 50 times our traffic.

In our business, we have to build strong defensibility in the form of strong supply chain understanding and distinctive product. We work on design, sourcing and quality of product. The result keeps showing continuously. We get lesser complaints. Furniture is a complex product. That is something a horizontal player will not try to do. They take furniture as one more category. They prefer to have buy and sell product as opposed to design product. It is quite unlikely that horizontal will start designing furniture and build distinctive supply chain for the category.

Q- How do you differentiate from vertical and horizontal furniture players?

A- Our entire supply chain is controlled by us. The delivery logistics for furniture is entirely different from books. First, the entire business operates on larger vehicles as opposed to two-wheelers. The transit warehouses are structured differently. The warehouse architecture is also different. In this category, there is no logistics company which has expertise therefore we do distribution ourselves. Packers and movers companies are good with movement of products but weak with technology.

The other big differentiator is quality process. In the case of mobile phones, there are no breakages during transportation. Take the case of large storage unit; it is a fragile product with wood and glass. At every stage, we have to do quality check. In a category like shirt, the only quality check is to see whether there's shirt in the parcel or not. Then, installation is a large part of this category. Most of our customers stay in apartments. Some apartments don't have elevators which allow three-seater sofas. You will not find this problem in any other category. Amazon and Flipkart have not launched furniture yet. Snapdeal is the only furniture player.

Q- What about product differentiation?

A- We work closely with a select set of sellers in Rajasthan, Bangalore, Chennai and Mumbai. We help them with design, quality and defining specifications of the product because some of them are small manufacturers and are not sophisticated. They are the sellers on our platform. They don't have access to NID (National Institute of Design) designers that we have in our team. In design, we have 15-20 people and some 40 people in quality division. Our model is the marketplace but we manage and control the customer experience. Furniture is the biggest category for us. Our average ticket size is Rs 20,000 which is highest in the industry because we are selling larger products such as sofas, dining tables, beds and storages.

Q- How do you plan to grow this category?

A- There's a facility where customers can sign up for trial room service for sofas. A customer can go to our website, and sign up for trial room. Once it is done, our team comes to their homes with three single-seater sofas. Basically, a customer is able to see how a particular design, colour and fabric go with the walls and flooring of the house. Our people come with different fabric options. We are scaling up this service. We also offer cash on delivery for 100 per cent of the product value. All this is to bring down the barrier for the customer. Buying furniture online will become a part of life.