Saturday, January 23, 2016

STARTUP SPECIAL................. Home and Dry?

Home and Dry?


Urban Ladder is a rare startup that had to actually scale down before it scaled up

With seed capital secure before they launched and startup stars in their eyes, the founders of Urban Ladder decided to go for broke when they launched in July 2012. The company, initially backed by Ka laari Capital (it has since raised $77 million from the likes of Sequoia Capital, Steadview Capital and TR Capital), launched its services across the country, leaning on third-party logistics providers to make deliveries. Rather than plaudits, Urban Ladder was inundated by customer complaints.Realising its folly, the company did something unexpected -it went from a panIndia presence to operations in just one city. “As a young startup our only mantra was how to grow rapidly,“ says Ashish Goel, a cofounder of Urban Ladder.As it turned out, building an online furniture business was much more than warpspeed growth. “We operate in a trust-deficit market,“ he adds, “We want to stand out with a focus on product, supply chain and logistics, as we seek to build a large, stable and scalable business.“
In the last couple of years, Urban Ladder appears to have made up for lost time, with the cofounders claiming that the company is 4050% ahead of its own targets in terms of customer acquisition, revenues and catalogue. “We had projected 10,000 shipments per month by December 2015, whereas we do tens of thousands of shipments today...we are 18-24 months from what we call making a million homes beautiful,“ says Goel. The company has painstakingly built its own delivery network and supply chain to try to keep product quality high and today delivers to 17 cities.
According to industry estimates, the furniture market is worth $25 billion, with the organised segment accounting for barely 1% of this and online players an even smaller sliver. Goel says that Urban Ladder has had to build its market from scratch; furniture design and construction continues to be dominated by the unorganised sector and the packaging and delivery of these products continues to a hit-and-miss affair.beThree years ago, when a fledgling Urban Ladder decided to shrink its services to one city, it gave up 7075% of its business, when it encountered low quality logistics, with hundreds of delayed deliveries or broken products. Since then, the company has worked to rebuild its reputation and create its own delivery network. “You have to build service to delight (doubting) customers and create an intimate and delightful experience,“ says cofounder Rajiv Srivastava.

ETM3JAN16

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