Furniture e-tailers eye kids’ furniture to beat slowdown

Online furniture retailers are readying to cash-in on the growing demand for kids’ furniture, bucking the trend of a slowdown in consumer goods and retail sectors.

Well heeled, young parents who are influenced by global trends are driving the demand for kids’ furniture across ages - infants, toddlers, pre-teens and teens.

More variety

Pepperfry has drawn up a blueprint to tap the lucrative ₹7,000 crore – ₹10,000 crore kids’ furniture market that is growing at a steady 20 per cent year-on-year.

Hussaine Kesury, Pepperfry’s Chief Category Officer, said, “While kids’ furniture has always been available on Pepperfry, we created a separate category for kids in June. We now have a curated selection of over 1,000 furniture products for kids from 45 brands on our marketplace including popular kids brands like Urge, Boingg, Adona, Alex Daisy, Lycka and Bubblegum. Nearly 85 per cent of the kids’ furniture market remains unorganised, therefore, it holds immense potential for growth.”

MollyCoddle, which is Pepperfry’s house brand for infants and toddlers, is also part of the selection, along with an expanded suite of products for pre-teens and teens under its house brands Mintwud and Casacraft. The company aims to grow its kids’ furniture business of ₹65 crore to ₹500 crore in the next three years.

“We aim to build a one-stop shop for kids’ furniture with over 5,000 listings and 200 plus brands by 2021. We will on-board regional, city-specific brands from across the country onto our marketplace that will give them national reach across 500 cities,” said Kesury.

Uptick in demand

Flipkart, which re-launched its furniture category and also unveiled its house brand for furniture Perfect Homes in 2017, said that this segment is one of the fastest growing categories in its furniture portfolio, witnessing 2x growth since the category became active in March 2019.

Flipkart has 200 brands selling over 1,200 SKUs in kids’ furniture on its marketplace including top brands like Meemee, Spacewood, Hometown, Nilkamal, @Home, Royal Oak, Century and Springtek.

“The growth in kids’ furniture since its launch is reflective of a change in young parents’ behaviour, who are laying special focus on building the child’s individuality by curating a special place for the child. While metros have the larger share in kids furniture purchase, Tier-II cities and beyond are slowly catching up due to wide selection, affordable payment options and seamless delivery,” said Kanchan Mishra, Director of Furniture, Flipkart.

Home interiors solutions start-up Design Café, which has completed over 2,000 homes in Bengaluru, sees a huge uptick in spend, upwards of ₹60,000 to ₹1.5 lakh on fixed furniture for children’s rooms. “We have created an entire range of furniture around themes like sports, super heroes and also gender neutral furniture for boys and girls. Parents are bringing their kids along for meetings where they articulate what they want,” said Gita Ramanan, co-founder and CEO, Design Café.

Amazon offers 4,000 products from 300 brands for kids and is in the process of setting up a separate store for kids furniture to cater to growing demand. Srikanth Iyer, co-founder and CEO of HomeLane.com, said, “Since most of our customers are families, the demand for kids’ furniture is very high, and comprises 15 per cent of our overall demand. Colourful wardrobes with funky themed finishes and space saving foldable beds/tables are top sellers.”