• Jordyblue is a direct-to-consumer furniture brand started in Bangalore, India in 2015. The brand was positioned as "Good design made affordable"
• I managed the market research and launch of the brand
• Market Research
  • We saw that the furniture industry in India was massively unorganized and had not taken advantage of online retailing that was growing rapidly with major forays by Amazon and local giant FlipKart (now owned by Walmart)
  • 2015 was a big year for online commerce in India - Internet penetration had grown rapidly in the first part of the decade, one in three phones sold in India were sold online
  • consumers were also beginning to think of design as not something that is "good to have" but as something that reflected their identity. This was evident in cars, motorbikes, smart phones and kitsch online stores such as chumbak gaining market share
  • The furniture industry in India was massively unorganized - dominated by few regional players, no flatpacked brands
  • Design was usually an after-thought for the industry and apart from a few forays by foreign brands such as La-Z-Boy, the industry was stagnant and lot of the newer consumers who's taste had been developed by exposure to design outside of India were unsatisfied.
• Launch Strategy
  • We bootstrapped to test our assumptions in the market.
  • Carried zero inventory, all initial orders were built to order
  • E-commerce website was up and running in two weeks, with an MVP brand identity
  • Worked with a furniture designer to shortlist 10 furniture designs that had a public use creative commons license, which also matched the positioning and taste that the market research was pointing to
  • Initial customers were acquired through Facebook ads - which were not competitively priced at the time in India.
  • This lean launch helped us gather valuable user feedback that helped us iterate on our design process. Couple of things we noticed for example
    • Indian users preferred smaller length of furniture because rooms were smaller sized than a typical American/European suburban household
    • The material of upholstery was very important for households - They considered this to be a 10-15 purchase in some cases and wanted something that could be cleaned easily
  • The lean launch helped the company sell $40K worth of furniture in 6 months and helped them raise a series A round of funding of $200K to build our own manufacturing plant.
• Learnings
  • When under uncertainty take actions without committing to a plan - The lean launch helped us test a lot of our assumptions without sticking to a plan because the sunk cost and overheads were few.
  • Moving fast is always an advantage - Jordyblue was one of the first DTC furniture brands in India. From idea to launch we took 45 days. We noticed many other DTC furniture brands crop in the later months that were not able to make big inroads in customer acquisition. Same applies to marketing channels. Our cost per lead was the lowest it ever was in the first few months of launch