Exclusive | Competing against all odds: FabFurnish's Vaibhav Aggarwal

FabFurnish.com, a growing and evolving home e-commerce portal retails designer furniture, furnishings, décor items and kitchenware, showcases an assortment of more than 15,000 home products and carries several top-end brands and over 7,000 products. Top brands include Noritake, Bombay Dyeing,Corelle, Esprit, Tupperware, Swayam, Fab Home, KingSelect, MOM-Italy, Elmwood, Blossoms, Rocca and Eternal among others. Highest selling products at Fabfurnish.com include solidwood furniture items - recliners, coffee and accent tables, book cases, collapsible furniture, and sofa beds. Among the other products, the kitchen category, in its entirety, is quite a hit with customers.

Vaibhav Aggarwal, a graduate from the esteemed Indian Institute of Technology- Guwahati, completed his masters in business administration from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Currently, Co-founder and Managing Director atFabFurnish.com. this portal has seen significant growth in a short span of time under his supervision. He oversees all marketing activities and initiatives at FabFurnish.com.

Adgully caught up with Vaibhav Aggarwal, Co-founder and Managing Director, FabFurnish.com to know more about the success story of their portal and their innovative efforts and strategies that have contributed to make it a class apart from most other portals. Excerpts from the interview:

Adgully(AG): How did the idea of launching and starting up a portal like Fabfurnish.com come about?

Vaibhav Aggarwal (VA): While the largest organized player is only $200-300 million, Indian home furniture & furnishing market in itself is worth more than $18 billion! So there’s a huge potential to build a scale business in this segment. Besides, shopping for home in local Indian markets, even in metros, is quite a painful process owing to its largely unorganized setup. This is how the idea of helping people to beautify their homes, by venturing into this untapped segment, made sense to us.

AG: Online home décor and furniture market is emerging as one the profitable categories in e-commerce industry, how would you like to evaluate the same with your understanding and viewpoints?

VA: Given the largely unbranded nature of the segment, it is possible here to generate margins higher than other ecommerce categories such as electronics, travel or even fashion. 

AG:  What were some of the challenges that you faced initially during the launch of India’s largest home e-commerce portals?

VA: Initially, we had some concerns over the touch-and-feel factor involved in furniture buying, especially in the Indian market scenario, where online furniture buying is still in its nascent stage. Nevertheless the traction observed since March’12, when we launched FabFurnish.com, has been very encouraging.

AG: Please share some key high points and also the challenges that you faced in the course of your professional journey?

VA: Building an A-team and retaining that talent is always the biggest challenge when it comes to starting up. No matter the business you are in, it’s the people who can make or break your business.
There have been so many special moments during the last 2 years since the launch of FabFurnish – shipping the first order, hitting 100 orders a day, hitting 1000 orders a day – all of those milestone have been very special.

AG: FabFurnish.com has seen significant growth in a short span of time under your supervision. What are the mantras that you believe in, which has helped you achieve this growth?

VA: We have always aimed to provide an exhaustive home assortment and complete customer satisfaction in terms of quality, pricing, customer service, and delivery. This is what has helped us achieve this growth.

AG: The Indian Home Décor market which stood at $13 billion in 2010 will touch $20 billion by year 2015. Would you like to elaborate on the same and also what trends do you see in the industry with such growth ratio?

VA: It is in fact a significantly sized market and that is what makes this business so exciting. At the end of the day, irrespective of their socio-economic class, people take pride in doing up their homes beautifully. Impending entry of some of the biggest global players in this segment is a validation of the growth potential of this segment.

AG: What has been Fabfurnish’s game plan and strategy that has led to its success?

VA: There are quite a few reasons that have led to our success – an exceptionally talented and dedicated team; excellent, sound marketing strategies; our large and contemporary assortment of more than 25000 products, thorough product display with 360-view of every product and convenient payment options that even include part-payment option. Add to it, our good customer services. In a nutshell, we have tried to deliver quality to our customer in terms of both – product and services. 

AG: Who would you consider your competitors presently and how does FabFurnish cope and deal with competition?

VA: Our major competition right now comes from offline furniture and décor markets. Also, any e-commerce player dealing in home furniture or furnishings is our competitor. We prefer healthy competition as more competitors would help us in developing this nascent online market faster. We differentiate ourselves with our niche and carefully curated collection, our product imagery, multitude of payment options offered, and superior customer service. Moreover, we are very innovative when it comes to marketing, and that has given us an edge over our online competition.

AG: You oversee all marketing activities and initiatives atFabfurnish.com. According to you which strategies in terms of marketing and advertising have given you best results?

VA: FabFurnish has seen super ROI and been analytics driven in its marketing activities. For each marketing campaign, we have a well defined set of performance metrics and are fine-tuning our campaigns 24x7. We have also invested in social media, given the awareness and credibility it can help us establish.

AG: Which are your key markets presently?  What is your road map in terms of entering new markets?

VA: We have pan-India shipping right now. Metros lead the march in terms of biggest markets.

AG: How has the brand grown over the years in terms of sales and profits?

VA: We have gone on to become India’s largest online home store in terms of visitors, collection and customers served to date. As per industry’s leading publications, our traffic is more than 2x our next online competitor. We currently have 25,000+ home products, with an ambition to grow this number by 100% over the next 3 months.

AG: In terms of promotion and advertising how deeply has social media impacted your business at Fabfurnish.com?What are the online buying trends in this category?

VA: A great deal, I must say. Our customer base is well-informed, tech-savvy and has a taste for good living. Social media drives a lot of awareness among our target customer base as well as helps us establish brand credibility in the market.  We have seen a disproportionate demand for niche categories such as recliners, bakeware, collapsible storage, etc. which are not easily available in the offline market.

AG: According to you what are some of the qualities entrepreneurs should be equipped with to be successful in their respective fields?

VA: In my view essentially 4 key qualities are necessary. The ability to build a AAA team, being innovative when finding growth hacks, tenacity, and an ability to prioritize work among many options that are always available.

AG: In your opinion will online along with brick and mortar retail outlets accelerate faster growth for Fabfurnish.com.

VA: We have been very opportunistic when it comes to setting up our franchise stores. Our business focus continues to be online.

AG: With regard to sales is it a metro skew or would you attribute it to the smaller markets too that have resounded well?

VA: While the business is skewed towards Metros, Tier 2 & 3 cities have resounded well too.

AG: How do you decide on the product range and pricing? Please explain your strategies on the same.

VA: Our rigorously changing product range depends on the latest design trends, seasonality, customer demands, advanced quality and our bid to redefine home fashion. Hence, it involvestremendous research and much thought behind every product in our assortment. The idea is to provide tastefully-picked, quality products at unbeatable prices to our customers.