Mumbai: Furlenco, has expanded its operations to Kolkata, marking its foray into the eastern region. This move aligns with the company’s mission to provide hassle-free, premium furniture rental solutions to urban dwellers. With a customer base exceeding 300,000 across more than 25 cities, Furlenco has established a strong presence in Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi-NCR, Hyderabad, and Pune.
To celebrate its entry into Kolkata, Furlenco has launched a distinctive taxi-top advertising campaign, embracing the city’s rich culture. The initiative transforms the iconic Kolkata taxis into mobile billboards showcasing Furlenco’s premium furniture range. Featuring furniture setups atop the vehicles, the campaign highlights the comfort and convenience offered by the brand’s rental solutions, aiming to engage the city’s diverse audience and boost brand visibility.
Furlenco CEO & founder, Ajith Karimpana stated, “At Furlenco, our goal has always been to simplify urban living by offering stylish and sustainable furniture solutions that adapt to our customers’ needs. With Kolkata joining our growing network, we are excited to empower more people with the freedom to create comfortable and functional spaces without long-term commitments.”
With shifting consumer preferences, rental solutions are increasingly becoming the preferred choice for urban dwellers who value convenience and flexibility over ownership. Furlenco’s subscription-based model removes the burden of upfront costs, heavy deposits, and logistical challenges, allowing customers to adapt seamlessly to their evolving needs.
As a pioneer in the furniture rental industry, Furlenco remains committed to its core values of convenience, affordability, and sustainability. By providing stylish, sustainable, and cost-effective furniture options, the brand is redefining urban living across India.
MUMBAI: Furniture rental and lifestyle brand Furlenco has signed ITW Playworx, the brand solutions arm of ITW Universe, as its strategic communications partner. The partnership will focus on driving Furlenco’s communication strategies to enhance its brand narrative and build stronger connections with its target audience.
As part of this mandate, ITW Playworx, which says it is India’s only full-stack agency offering a complete range of services through a single window, will craft and execute a comprehensive PR strategy for Furlenco, leveraging innovative approaches to elevate the brand’s visibility. Additionally, ITW Universe will work closely with its marketing team to amplify the brand’s presence through outdoor advertising (OOH) and sports marketing platforms, ensuring an integrated and impactful outreach.
Said Fluorenco CEO & fonder Ajith Karimpana: “Furlenco has always strived to create exceptional experiences for the customers by offering premium, flexible home solutions. Partnering with ITW Playworx aligns with our goal of engaging meaningfully with our audience. We are confident this collaboration will help us achieve greater visibility and strengthen our brand’s positioning in the market.”
ITW Playworx CEO Sidharth Ghosh said, “Furlenco is redefining modern living, and we are proud to partner with a brand that resonates with urban India’s aspirations. At ITW Playworx, we craft purpose-driven strategies that elevate brands and build deeper emotional connections. This partnership is a valuable opportunity to showcase our expertise in impactful storytelling.”
ITW Universe co-founder Bhairav Shanth opined, “We are excited to be working with a truly new economy brand like Furlenco on boosting its brand presence and salience. An interconnected consumer market requires strategies that are truly integrated across multiple channels and building on the work that ITW Playworx will be doing we will also be helping the brand with a holistic 360 plan spanning across multiple touchpoints such as digital/OTT, sports marketing, OOH and more.”
ITW Playworx aims to position Furlenco as not just a furniture rental platform but a lifestyle brand that resonates with the modern Indian consumer.
MUMBAI: Furlenco, India’s largest furniture subscription company, has released two digital ad films on their YouTube, Facebook and Instagram pages. The ad films exemplify the brand’s philosophy of going against the tradition of owning things. In the same spirit, the films defies the notion that ‘good things take time’ and convey how with Furlenco, #SomeGoodThingsComeEasy. The campaign has been conceptualized by Furlenco’s in-house creative team.
The first film shows a young bachelor getting ready for a road trip for some me-time. Things take a U-turn when his family turns up at his door to surprise him for Diwali. It goes on to show how he plays it smart and quickly gets a furniture subscription to transform his bachelor pad to make it comfortable for his loved ones. The second film is about a young daughter worried about the money being spent on buying things for the house. She then gets a Furlenco furniture subscription and gives her mother what she wants without spending on yet another ‘thing’. Two more films will be released in November 2019.
Speaking about this, Furlenco Chief Operating Officer Ashwin Venkatraman said, “Urban millennials are practical. They believe in living in the moment and are not interested in owning expensive things. For them, it is important to be smart and live a life that prioritises their comfort. And subscription as a way of life suits that mindset. Our new ad films aptly convey our philosophy of renting over buying and show how it can save time, effort, and money without compromising on quality or aesthetics. ”
Furlenco is an online-only furniture company with a difference, catering to the lifestyle aspirations of contemporary urban Indians in an unmatched way. It is India's largest rental company and offers high-quality and trendy furniture on a monthly subscription basis. With value adds such as 72-hour delivery, free relocation and free cleaning, the brand solves the hassles that typically come with buying and owning furniture. Their offering is targeted at a generation that doesn’t always believe in conventions or the need to ‘settle down’ to live their best life. For millennials, friends are as important as family, me-time is sacrosanct, and money is better spent on experiences rather than things.
From a handful of orders in the first year to having furnished about 90,000 homes, Furlenco has grown from strength to strength. The company aims to achieve a subscription revenue of INR 2000 crore by the year 2023.
MUMBAI: Eight years ago, the concept of buying home furniture online seemed nothing more than an impossible task and worth a laugh or two. But today, things have changed drastically and buying furniture online seems so much more convenient and time saving than making rounds of multiple stores and choosing from the limited options each of them have.
Furniture is one of those few categories in e-commerce wherein quality triumphs over discounts. People are willing to spend a few extra bucks for better quality.
Even today, 90 per cent of India’s furniture sector continues to remain unorganised. Of the organised, only one per cent is online as per estimates. According to a report by Redseer Consulting, the home furniture industry in India was worth $25 billion in 2016 and is expected to grow to $35 billion by 2020 of which, the online section will be worth $700 million.
Launched in 2012, Pepperfry was one of the earliest entrants in the online furniture selling business. The company initially started off by selling furniture, home decor, furnishing, kitchen utilities, fashion and jewellery all under one roof. But after a year’s time, it decided to drop fashion and jewellery and keep its core to furniture.
Pepperfry, which commands a 65 per cent share of India’s organised furniture market, has its target audience in metros and mini metros. Urban youth, newer cities, complexes and migrant professionals are Pepperfry’s core customers. The majority of its sale comes from Bengaluru. Additionally, Pune, Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Chennai, Delhi and Mumbai are also the company’s largest markets. In terms of sale, Pune is bigger than Chennai, Gurgaon is as big as Delhi, Bengaluru is bigger than Delhi and Mumbai combined.
Catering to a large number of young customers, the brand communication must be in their preferred medium – digital. Pepperfry CMO and head of new business Kashyap Vadapalli says that increasingly people are becoming extremely comfortable buying furniture on-the-go (on mobile devices) which wasn’t the case earlier as they preferred shopping only via desktops and laptops.
Digital will also change the way we shop going forward and enhance the entire shopping experience. Technology is reshaping the way we look and shop today. Brands across sectors are experimenting with technologies such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to give a better shopping experience to consumers. Vadapalli affirms that over the next couple of years, we will see a lot of innovation in online furniture space. Pepperfry is investing in enhancing the AR capabilities on phone and if that happens, customers can judge the images much better, they can rotate the images much better and that will help them in taking smart decisions. The company is also looking at investing in VR to set up zones where people can try on different looks and set ups in a virtual fashion.
Although Swedish furniture major IKEA is using these technologies in the US, the renewed shopping model is still fairly new for the Indian audience and the technology back here in India hasn’t been perfected yet. He says that the technology is a little rough in India but it is improving very quickly. Pepperfry has looked at a lot of VR options but the images are very grainy and shifting between looks is a task. Vadapalli thinks it should take only six to 12 months for Indians to perfect the glitch and once it happens, consumers in India will prefer shopping only online.
While quality wins over discounts for urban consumers, the situation in rural areas is far from this. Although the digital penetration in smaller towns is increasing, the concept of buying furniture is still unpopular. This is mainly because touch and feel are still prominent in smaller pockets of the society and people still prefer going to their carpenters or brick and mortar store. Pepperfry doesn’t consider rural as its market as 90 per cent of its business comes from 27 cities that it already functions in but believes rural to be its growth market five years down the line.
Although one of the earliest entrants in the Indian market, Pepperfry today faces stiff completion from other players including FabFurnish, Urban Ladder and a new sub-segment in the category: rental furniture companies like Furlenco and Rentmojo. Pepperfry delivers to 150 cities using its own vehicles across the country, which is the highest reach in this segment. Its competitor Urban Ladder is present in over 100 cities, whereas FabFurnish’s specialised logistics service FabOne is available in seven cities, although the company uses third-party logistics firms to cover more than 100 cities.
After six years in existence, Pepperfry has launched 10 house brands that contribute 50 per cent to its business, 27 Pepperfry studios across 15 major metros and mini metros in the country and is planning to launch 12 more. Vadapalli states that modular furniture is the fastest growing category for Pepperfry today and while furniture drives maximum sales from the entire bouquet, all other categories are expected to grow faster in the next 12 months.
Pepperfry roughly spends anything between Rs 80 and 100 crore annually on its marketing which is split 50-50 between digital and offline (television). He adds, “Digital has always been our core focus and TV only comes in for big campaigns and it provides a business uplift. When we run a TV campaign, we see the traffic going up within an hour. We know TV works and so we will use it strategically, while digital is our continuous bread and butter.”
Although the company does not export to other counties right now, Vadapalli considers it to be a definite plan and idea for the future.
In today’s time, creating brand awareness is one of the key necessities for a successful brand image and Pepperfry has been a part of few branded content on digital platforms and will continue to do brand integration and create branded content.
In the second half of 2018, Pepperfry is all set with its huge campaign around non-furniture categories including kitchen and home decor. Vadapalli says that this campaign will be a major push for its sales.
Some new ad films from the campaign were launched on 14 April 2018.
MUMBAI: While the world is raving about Huffington Post’s digital video series ‘Talk To Me’ that urges children to interview their parents, India’s own digital content and web series pioneer TVF has come up with its own variant of the same, only with an added dose of laughter. Calling it an infomercial, The Viral Fever has partnered with furniture rental brand Furlenco to launch ‘Truth or Dare with Dad’.
Truth or Dare with Dad is a hilarious sketch between father and son and friend, as they go through a grueling fun game of Truth or Dare. Starring everyone’s favorite from the TVF team, Jitendra Kumar (lovingly known as Jeetu!) enjoy the infomercial as Jeetu teaches his Dad the game and learns many a new thing along the way!
Commenting on the launch, Furlenco CEO and founder Ajith Mohan Karimpana said, “TVF is an immensely popular youth-centric digital content platform in our country, which boasts of more than 15,00,000 viewers. The idea of launching an infomercial with TVF came from a simple thought of introducing Furlenco to the youth of this city as well as all the other metropolitan cities, who are also our target group. We aim to make aspirations of Pune’s aspirers more accessible by providing premium designer furniture on rent. They can now Have Everything and Buy Nothing.”
Having pioneered the web series genre in India and created two very successful web series Permanent Roommates and Pitchers, The Viral Fever (TVF) ‘s founder Arunabh Kumar added, “Furlenco has made lives of young working professionals simpler without burning a hole in their pockets. As the fan base of TVF is primarily the youth – this collaboration was really exciting for us.”
Truth or Dare with Dad is written by Chandan Kumar and directed by Raghav Subbu from Team TVF.
MUMBAI: While the world is raving about Huffington Post’s digital video series ‘Talk To Me’ that urges children to interview their parents, India’s own digital content and web series pioneer TVF has come up with its own variant of the same, only with an added dose of laughter. Calling it an infomercial, The Viral Fever has partnered with furniture rental brand Furlenco to launch ‘Truth or Dare with Dad’.
Truth or Dare with Dad is a hilarious sketch between father and son and friend, as they go through a grueling fun game of Truth or Dare. Starring everyone’s favorite from the TVF team, Jitendra Kumar (lovingly known as Jeetu!) enjoy the infomercial as Jeetu teaches his Dad the game and learns many a new thing along the way!
Commenting on the launch, Furlenco CEO and founder Ajith Mohan Karimpana said, “TVF is an immensely popular youth-centric digital content platform in our country, which boasts of more than 15,00,000 viewers. The idea of launching an infomercial with TVF came from a simple thought of introducing Furlenco to the youth of this city as well as all the other metropolitan cities, who are also our target group. We aim to make aspirations of Pune’s aspirers more accessible by providing premium designer furniture on rent. They can now Have Everything and Buy Nothing.”
Having pioneered the web series genre in India and created two very successful web series Permanent Roommates and Pitchers, The Viral Fever (TVF) ‘s founder Arunabh Kumar added, “Furlenco has made lives of young working professionals simpler without burning a hole in their pockets. As the fan base of TVF is primarily the youth – this collaboration was really exciting for us.”
Truth or Dare with Dad is written by Chandan Kumar and directed by Raghav Subbu from Team TVF.
