Remember the early days when shopping for furniture was an arduous and painful task? Now, however, thanks to the founders of Pepperfry, the days of trudging through narrow roads and haggling for cheap furniture are a thing of the past. Founded by Ambareesh Murty and Ashish Shah, the idea of launching an online store came over a lunch which changed the way people bought furniture online.
The beginning
When Murty and Shah met at a mutual friend’s office over lunch, the duo realised they were all working on addressing a major gap in the industry: the absence of one platform catering to all your lifestyle needs. A tissue paper turned out to be the piece of paper where plans for the future of Pepperfry were carefully sketched out. Back then, the platform didn’t focus on just furniture, but had a wide array of categories, ranging over products like jewelry, fashion and clothes.
While the idea was written and the team was ready to hit the ground running, the initial round of funding of $ 5 million from Norwest didn’t come in till almost 6 months after signing the deal. The months when the funds didn’t come in were extremely nerve wracking for the founders. The team of ten were running low on morale and the website was not launched yet. Things were so bad, the team were down to the last Rs. 10 lakhs and thought the time had come to give up all hope.
On the day the founders were almost ready to pull the plug on their relationship with Norwest, an investment came in, like a ray of sunshine on a cloudy day. With renewed hope and an influx of $ 5 million in cash, the founders of Pepperfry were all set to make a splash in the industry. Through the years, the team started growing in size and decided the time had come to narrow down to just one specific line: furniture.
The future
By the time the team started growing and making an impact, the furniture industry had not started blooming. One of the major hurdles Pepperfry had to work over was to ensure the products people were ordering online had the exact specifications. If the specifications weren’t met to perfection, the team could lose existing, as well as perspective customers, resulting in a decline of income for the company. Perhaps one of the things which sets Pepperfry apart is, Pepperfry isn’t a search driven website, but is more focused on improving the user’s browsing experience. Further, by focusing primarily on in house logistics, the Pepperfry team reduced the delivery time drastically (from 25 days to 11 days.) In Mumbai, the team worked to bring down the time of delivery to same day delivery! By developing a logistics algorithm for the delivery vehicles, the Pepperfry team can locate whether the truck has delivered the furniture on time or not.
While initially catering only to the online market, Pepperfry branched out to include the offline customers as well and by 2014, the Company opened its stores across India. Today, this startup accounts for more than 50 % of the furniture industry’s market share and by looking at its growth chart, Pepperfry has no plans of stopping any time soon!
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