Home design giant Houzz lands in Asia with Japan expansion

Houzz has arrived in Asia. The home design and remodeling unicorn – most recently valued at US$2.3 billion – opened its Japan office today. It is the sixth new market since 2014, following the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, France, and Russia.

Since it started in 2009, Houzz has steadily grown, becoming a powerhouse in the home design business. It now has 25 million monthly unique users, at least one in every country in the world.

It has become popular as a full-service platform. Users can browse pictures of room interiors and building exteriors for inspiration. The pictures have some items tagged with product descriptions and purchase links. Houzz also offers the opportunity to read up on the latest styles and connect to – or even hire – professional designers.

Speaking at a special “Open Houzz,” co-founder and CEO Adi Tatarko explained why her team chose Japan. “There is a great community here that really wants to help us transform the industry and bring it into the 21st century,” she said. “There is also global interest in the Japanese market. Many searches on the platform are for Japanese design, japanese gardens, tea rooms, zen rooms.”

Tatarko believes that Houzz can grow organically in the Japan market much like it did in America. The service is launching with over 1,000 professionals already registered and she expects thousands more to come. “The Japanese market is very big. Japanese professionals are very interested in getting this exposure from both this local market as well as the global market,” she said.

The Japan team is starting out with 15 people, a small fraction of Houzz’s 450 employees. They are lead by Aiko Katoh, a Goldman Sachs veteran and INSEAD graduate. Katoh also has experience running her own startup, Beauty Trend Japan, which provided the cosmetic ecommerce service GlossyBox. Though she drove the company to profitability in its first year, Katoh left and started looking for a new opportunity.

“I was actually in the process of starting [a new] business when I was introduced to Houzz. It was also in cosmetics, for content marketing. But I saw Houzz and I just fell in love with it to be honest,” she told Tech in Asia.

Now Katoh is focused on making more Japanese fall in love with Houzz. For the time being she can do that without worrying about revenue. “At the beginning we are not monetizing. Exactly like we built it in the US, we’ll focus on product and user experience first and then monetization. It’s all free,” Tatarko affirmed.

The Houzz team is likely to find early adopters, but the market isn’t entirely theirs for the taking. On Tuesday, the same day Tatarko took center stage at the New Economy Summit (NES) and introduced her service to a host of Japanese corporations, a local startup, Renoveru joined the NES pitch contest. With a business model much the same as Houzz, Renoveru impressed the audience and the judges, taking home second prize.