Furniture Maker Article

Modern Design

Furniture Maker Article

Article’s furniture is mid-range to high-end modern. Its Sven sofa, in blue velvet, with crisp lines and a tufted seat, sells for $1,299 (which it claims compares to a retail value of $2,500), while its Mara round marble table goes for $299 (which it says is less than half the $700 it would go for in a store).

The founders bootstrapped the business, able to invest themselves from having founded other companies previously. Of a total $5 million invested in the early years, they took on $2.8 million from Vancouver Founder Fund, whose managing partner is Fraser Hall and whose investors include Aamir Baig. “There are no new voices at the table,” Hall says. “We like the idea that the business should be self-sustaining. That’s always been in our DNA.”

In its early days, the company said on its website that its sofas were produced at the same factory that made furniture for brands like B&B Italia and Knoll, but it pulled the information down at the request of the factory’s owners, according to the New York Times. “The factories that run our production are also running production for some of the who’s who of the designer furniture industry,” Baig says today. “Of course, our designs are exclusive to us.” The materials in its products come from all over the world with leather from cows in South America that’s processed in tanneries in Italy, and marble from Europe. The factories it works with are all overseas – in Vietnam, China, Indonesia and India – where costs are lower than in North America.

Furniture Maker Article

As a manufacturer and retailer, Article has access to voluminous data about what’s selling and what isn’t, allowing it to test its products with small production volumes, and then move quickly to produce more of what’s selling or to kill off or change what isn’t. “You know what’s in demand and what’s not in demand,” Baig says. “You don’t end up with mountains of product that you are trying to push through to the consumer.” The company’s most popular item has been its Sven sofa, in Italian charme tan leather. “As soon as we put it up, we could tell we had something there,” he says. “So we promoted it more, and that amplified its popularity.”

The U.S. furniture market is gigantic, with sales of more than $100 billion in the U.S., but it’s a fragmented market, and even big furniture retailers, like West Elm (part of Williams-Sonoma), Crate & Barrel (owned by Germany’s Otto Group) and RH (formerly known as Restoration Hardware), have relatively small slices of the market. While Article isn’t the only furniture startup trying to reengineer the furniture business for Millennial consumers – others include Burrow and Floyd (which manufactures in the United States) – it may be the largest so far.

As it expands, Baig plans to introduce 1,000 new items, especially in bedroom furniture and tables and chairs. Future product offerings could range from rugs to lamps to home decor. While the company was launched with a modern aesthetic designed to appeal to urban Millennials, its goal is bigger. “The ambition of the company,” Baig says, “is to grow beyond that.”

source: forbes