Aside from the Swedish meatballs, Chairish takes away the need to endure the frustration that is Ikea. The startup has raised $3.3 million to grow its peer-to-peer marketplace for reselling furniture.
Chairish is basically an online consignment store filled Ralph Lauren chairs, mahogany tables, and handcrafted rugs. People list furniture or decor they no longer want, and people on the other side can browse through pages of quality furniture at significantly reduced prices. The listings include work from well-known designers and items in a wide range of design styles. Chairish helps sellers with logistics and payments, and offers a concierge service to post items for them.
Furnishing a home is generally an enjoyable, yet expensive and time-consuming process. I recently furnished my apartment and spent hours going into every furniture and thrift store in a 10 block radius looking for unique items that weren’t mass-produced, and yet remained affordable. I also searched around on Craigslist for used furniture. My efforts were largely unsuccessful on both fronts. I couldn’t afford the nice things from nice stores, and spending my Saturday combing through dusty consignment stores or visiting strangers’ homes in the Mission was not appealing either. This is the gap Chairish is trying to fill.
There are plenty of places to buy furniture online — Wayfair and Amazon have massive home furnishing inventories, retailers like Ikea, Target, Walmart operate online stores, and marketplaces Craigslist and Etsy also feature furniture. However Chairish is taking advantage of peer-to-peer transactions to make use of un or under-used assets. The sharing economy has erupted over the past few years and people are turning to online marketplaces to make money off their existing resources and/or find cool things at lower prices. Fashion resale startups like Poshmark and Threadflip have done this successfully, and Chairish is applying the same principle to home furnishings.
The company was founded by Eric Grosse ,Gregg and Anna Brockway, Andy Denmark, and Nancy Ramamurthi. Grosse was a cofounder and President of Hotwire.com, and then went on to serve as President of Expedia, CEO of TaskRabbit, and now is at the helm of Chairish. Brockway previously founded TripIt, which was acquired for $120 million in 2011, where he also worked with Denmark and Ramamurthi. The site’s chief curator is Brockway’s wife Anna who is the former VP of marketing at Levi Strauss. The Brockways came up for the idea while moving houses and having no place to sell the high-end furniture that they didn’t want in their new home. Rather than allow their possessions to languish, they created a place where people could get the most out of their investment.
Azure Capital Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV) led this round, both who invested in TripIt. It will support growth of the marketplace, which launched earlier this year. Chairish receives 20% of the selling price upon sale and arranges shipping.
Chairish is based in San Francisco.
Filed under: Business, Deals, Entrepreneur, Lifestyle
Rebecca Grant 19 Jul, 2013
enclosure: http://venturebeat.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/971253_473605896051342_1402372068_n.jpg?w=160
-
Source: http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/18/founders-of-hotwire-tripit-raise-3-3m-for-furniture-resale-marketplace/
--
Manage subscription | Powered by rssforward.com Artikel terkait :
0 komentar :
Posting Komentar