Startup Series: Homespring - High Quality Furniture for Generation Rent
Environmentally conscious, commitment phobic, or just indecisive? In a market research survey conducted by Lab42 published by Adweek, most millenials today aged 18-38 prefer renting over purchasing goods. Today, thanks to the rise of rental subscription services ranging from clothing to furniture, tools to technology, millennials can now pick from best in class offerings and incur minimum cost for maximum gain, all while saving the environment. How's that for a mission?
Antler
Homespring, one of our Amsterdam based portfolio companies, is building a furniture subscription service focused on letting users rent high quality furniture from premium brands. Research Nester's industry analysis on the Global Commercial & Residential Furniture Rental Market shows that the named market can be expected to garner USD 33,861 Million by the end of 2025. Working towards taking a chunk of that, we caught up with Homespring to learn more about how they are growing their business, and how COVID-19 has changed their lives.
The team behind Homespring
Founded by good friends, Jozef Misik (CEO), George Ankomah (CMO) and Max Schulkens (CTO), the idea for the company was born out of Antler Amsterdam's inaugural cohort in May 2019, where Jozef spent time thinking about how to best bring this idea to life. With shared experiences in entrepreneurship, tech investing and a passion for innovation, Homespring's co-founding team was born.
How Homespring works
Using Homespring is simple. By giving customers access to high quality furniture that is assembled on demand for a low monthly subscription price, Homespring gives you the option to return or keep items - minus the rental fee you've already spent should you choose to keep your selected item. With a focus on helping customers select the high quality items they'd like to have, Homespring gives customers the ability to create their Instagram-ready dream home quickly and easily.
Post Demo Day
The future can be uncertain for some startups, but not for Homespring. With a clear sense of what they wanted to accomplish post Demo Day in November 2019, Homespring honed in on three key milestones after Demo Day -- customer acquisition, furniture brand on-boarding, and furniture financing. With these three milestones secured over the last several months, they were able to achieve their mission -- to have happy customers -- with purposeful ease.
How the Home and Garden category is growing during Covid-19
According to SEMRUSH, COVID-19 consumer spending looks positive for the Home and Garden category, growing up to 79% in search volume since the beginning of the pandemic. With more people turning to online home solutions to decorate and furnish their homes because retail stores are closed along with a renewed consumer interest in home improvement, Homespring has seen an increased demand for its services. However, despite these positive early indicators, the team is opting to be cautiously optimistic, scaling slowly and steadily for now to ensure that they are able to keep delivering on their brand values and world class customer experience.
Future plans
As CEO, Jozef shared with us that he is excited to, collectively with his stellar team, set his entrepreneurial spirit free and with it dive into the market expansion phase for Homespring. Early results look promising, and with us all having become more conscious of turning our homes into the best versions they can be, we think the sky is the limit for Homespring.
Want to know more about what they are building? Find out more on their website.
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