India’s BedBathMore buys marketplace of interior designers to go beyond home furnishing

India’s BedBathMore, an online shopping portal in the home furnishings and lifestyle segment, today announced it acquired Homado, a marketplace for interior designers. The deal size remains undisclosed.

With this, Homado’s eight member team including founders Anupam Sinhal and Vikas Chaudhary will join BedBathMore.

Homado’s 3,000 architects and interior designers have been integrated into the existing offerings of BedBathMore. It aims to onboard 10,000 more this year.

The nine-month-old startup is at a pre-revenue stage.

BedBathMore also announced its plans to go beyond ecommerce and turn into a community. In its new avatar, the consumer’s interaction with the lifestyle brand will begin with curated content on home décor, created by a team of editorial experts, as well as engaging user generated content.

“BedBathMore will now offer the online shoppers a platform that provides end-to-end home solutions,” the company said in a statement.

“We wanted to give home buyers an inspiration which comes from relevant content. Hence, we are evolving from a pure ecommerce model. Our goal is to offer intelligent and effective single window solutions for making homes better,” said Amit Dalmia, founder and managing director of BedBathMore.

BedBathMore is backed by Blume Ventures and home furnishing exporter Creative Group.

According to the company, the industry is pegged at INR 600 billion (US$9.4 billion).

BedBathMore 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.