I live in an apartment where my living room is not only a space for my couch and TV, but it’s also my dining room, my office, and my closet all rolled into one. After a recent trip to a nearby furniture stores to buy some more seating for friends to come over, the only thing I noticed was making rounds of multiple stores is just too much of effort and time consuming.
Luckily new classes of entrepreneurs recognized how tedious and time consuming the furniture buying affair is and created an easier and modern method for people who don’t have time or the desire to spend their whole weekend running around the furniture stores.
One such startup is Camabeds, a furniture startup started by two Spanish entrepreneurs, Fernando Villuendas and Antonio Fernandez in India. Fernando and Antonio founded Camabeds back in 2014, when they saw India’s enormous economic growth and demand for high quality services and products.
The duo is engaged in various ventures in both the continents like solar energy, trade and even laundry and dry cleaning. Along with Kamil Pawlowicz, who is the brand’s CEO, they created Camabeds as a results of the company’s mission of making it easy to buy great value products everywhere in India.
Camabeds creates modern and high-quality convertible guest furniture for homes and hotels that are conceptualized in Spain and manufactured in Pune, Maharashtra. It manufactures various kinds of folding beds, sofa beds, puff beds, and bunk beds.
The company has an advantage over its competitors in quality of the furniture as it maintains a limited number of SKUs. This helps them to keep very close view on each product performance and manufacture only the best-selling ones and rest of them are usually modified to adjust to market expectation. It believes to build a complete solution to provide unparalleled service to the consumers.
The company has expanded to most of the states in India and have partnered with many of companies from Hospitality and Retail industry and thousands of individual clients.
The startup’s entire model used to be based on e-commerce model; however it has also started partnering with dealers in different cities. The founders say, “There are many Indian customers who want the feel, touch, softness and most of all understand the functionality of the furniture before making a purchase which cannot be conveyed easily by photos or videos in online websites. Hence along the online model, we are trying out the offline model.”
The organized furniture market in India is around 8-10% of the total furniture market. Out of that the online share is very small but is growing fast due to consumers need. In the top 10 Indian cities, the market is growing at 20% CAGR. Urban lifestyle consumers are looking for branded goods, multiple choices and value for money products along with service which startups like Camabeds aims to address.
“The potential of the furniture market is enormous considering the demographics and players in the market. We look forward to further growth of sales from online as this is very new and relatively small, comparing to traditional retail, market. In next year we expect to hit 10 cores in sales from around 70 SKUs, which is around 20% higher in comparison to current year”, says Kamil.
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