Online furniture and home products marketplace Pepperfry is on track to be the country’s largest omni-channel home furniture retailer by March 2018, claimed a top company executive.

As furniture, a high-ticket category, does not naturally lend itself to online buying, the firm first opened a brand concept store, Studio Pepperfry, in 2014, to provide a fully designed home experience zone for customers, which has now been rolled out in 20 locations across Mumbai, Delhi, Gurugaon, Ghaziabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad and Chandigarh.

“From the beginning, our intention was to be present wherever our customers want us to be,” said Ashish Shah, founder and COO, Pepperfry. “Although we started off as an online marketplace, we decided to experiment with offline experience stores where customers can touch-feel-experience our products. Over the last two years, we have embarked on a journey of transforming to an omni-channel business through online and offline integration.” His experiment paid off big time, as 25 per cent of Pepperfry’s sales today comes from customers who have visited its Studios.

Plans are under-way to open 28 new Studios through the franchisee model, across Tier I and II cities such as Nashik, Nagpur, Bhubaneshwar, Lucknow, Kolkata, Vadodara, Madurai, Coimbatore and Mangaluru by March 2018, taking the firm’s total store count to 48 by the end of this fiscal.

Pepperfry has raised $164 million to date, and says it is on track to achieve a ₹3,000-crore in revenue run-rate by March 2018. Meanwhile, competitor Urban Ladder has also joined the omni-channel bandwagon with the launch of a experience centre in Bengaluru last year, followed by a Sofa Lounge last month, designed to showcase 60 per cent of its largest selling category.

Urban Ladder plans to set up 10 offline brand experience stores in Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai and open its first flagship retail store in Bengaluru next month. However, the company is yet to receive approval for a single-brand retail licence from the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion. On being contacted, the company said the store will be opened as an experience store until it receives the licence.

Recent entrant Livspace, a home interior design and execution platform, has opened four flagship Design Centres across top metros to bring an omni-channel design experience to home-owners. “The Design Centres are inspired by our 18-month-long research in Bengaluru in the omni-channel buying behaviour exhibited by over 5,000 home-owners buying interior design solutions, which cost ₹6-15 lakh,” said Anuj Srivastava, co-founder and CEO, Livspace.

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