Because carpenters screw you over, new startup ventures into custom furniture

It is not uncommon to see investment bankers and venture capitalists quit their well-paid (and boring, they say) jobs to take the plunge into startup life.

The latest to join the bandwagon is Steadview Capital’s CFO Vikas Nair and Deutsche Bank’s senior executive Ajit Shegaonkar.

“I founded a startup when I was 22, along with a couple of IIT Bombay batchmates, but that failed. Since then, starting up has always been in the works,” says Nair.

Since Shegaonkar had spare time after leaving the corporate world, he decided to fix his furniture and replace a few items. However, none of the big stores like Godrej Interio and @Home, or online furniture sellers like FabFurnish and UrbanLadder had anything to fit his needs.

Ultimately, he had to rely on carpenters, which didn’t end well. “The quality is so pathetic that the sliding doors don’t even move without considerable force,” says Shegaonkar.

That’s when he chucked away all the other ideas the duo had to set up Stitchwood, a tool for customers to design their own furniture online. The company also manufactures the pieces by sourcing “high quality” raw material from branded vendors, gets them manufactured from “curated carpenters,” and delivers the product in three weeks.

Sofa, so good

“Irregular home layouts, tiny room sizes, and varying tastes across regions make readymade furniture suboptimal for the market. The online readymade furniture players are doing roaring business, as no one wants to get into the hassle of engaging with carpenters. This makes StitchWood’s offering a solution to a uniquely Indian problem,” says Ajeet Khurana, an investor in the firm. Stitchwood has raised US$100,000 from a group of angel investors.

At the moment, Stitchwood has customizable options only for sofas. Users can design a sofa by uploading multiple images and saying what needs to be replicated from each of those items. A graphical representation of the desired product is shown to the user. And then an order is placed.

Alternatively, users can check out the designs pre-loaded on the portal, and then make minor alterations in color, upholstery, arm and leg design, and cushions.

The startup service is available only in Mumbai. It plans to expand to Pune and Delhi and add beds and dining tables to its portfolio.

Stitchwood competes with services like Nestopia, which is backed by plywood maker Century Ply. It’s also up against a fast-growing array of home decoration and furnishing startups in the country, such as Furlenco, Livspace, and the well-funded Urban Ladder, to name a few.

Rocket Internet is also in on the action with Fabfurnish, an app that allows users to take pictures of their room and drag and drop items of furniture to get a feel for how they’d look in their home.