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This is admirable, but seems much more difficult! With electronics, there are a handful of brands and products if you look at a particular piece of equipment. S

This is admirable, but seems much more difficult! With electronics, there are a handful of brands and products if you look at a particular piece of equipment. Specs are probably well scrape-able. The dimensions of a TV are not easy to fake/confuse. With furniture, even the definition of the article/product is not always clear, and there are hundreds of small companies making similar items, and differentiation in features or design that is often not visible / you have to lay hands on it to figure out what the difference in quality is (unless you're going for some kind of nameplate item that is easily recognizable, like an Eames chair). Or the addition of some extra feature changes the nature of the product. I think the difficulty is like trying to create a clothing aggregation engine if you took all the designer labels off the items. On the other hand, if they are truly interchangeable maybe that's all the more reason they can be compared. But, somehow I think people are more opinionated about finding the right piece of furniture that costs $1000 and not believing that the one from some non-brand website is the one they're looking for. I'm sure you've encountered all these issues, and I'm no expert. I will be interested to watch how it goes!

lgabraham 5y ago
It certainly is more complicated, and you bring up many good points. One thing working in our favor is that relatively few manufacturers make a lot of furniture that is sold. There are few suppliers and many channels, which means that often items are truly interchangeable. It is also the case that the stores with the cheapest prices tend to be recognizable big box brands (Home Depot, Lowes, etc.) not necessarily no-name stores. Some suppliers control their channels better, especially in the high end of the market. And there are D2C furniture brands that don’t sell through channels at all. We do hope to offer these stores a way to sell through our marketplace via an easy API. It certainly is the case that buying furniture is more emotional in a way buying a TV is not. We do want to honor this in how our site is organized.
- bredren 5y ago
  If you end up doing content marketing, it would be interesting to learn more about where “cheap” furniture is getting made and profiles of the people who make it. Not to dig on manufactured furniture but because the labels do a decent job of hiding these folks work.
  - lgabraham 5y ago
    A great point.

lgabraham 5y ago

It certainly is more complicated, and you bring up many good points. One thing working in our favor is that relatively few manufacturers make a lot of furniture that is sold. There are few suppliers and many channels, which means that often items are truly interchangeable. It is also the case that the stores with the cheapest prices tend to be recognizable big box brands (Home Depot, Lowes, etc.) not necessarily no-name stores. Some suppliers control their channels better, especially in the high end of the market. And there are D2C furniture brands that don’t sell through channels at all. We do hope to offer these stores a way to sell through our marketplace via an easy API. It certainly is the case that buying furniture is more emotional in a way buying a TV is not. We do want to honor this in how our site is organized.

bredren 5y ago
If you end up doing content marketing, it would be interesting to learn more about where “cheap” furniture is getting made and profiles of the people who make it. Not to dig on manufactured furniture but because the labels do a decent job of hiding these folks work.
- lgabraham 5y ago
  A great point.