[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Spoken (YC S21) - Better furniture shopping
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Launch HN: Spoken (YC S21) - Better furniture shopping
Hi HN, we're Dane and Geoff, the founders of Spoken
(https://www.spoken.io/). We make it easy to find the lowest price
for any furniture item across all big stores. Buying physical
things on the internet is hard. You have to quality-check a product
without touching it, double-check dimensions for where the thing
will go, and evaluate a seller's credibility, often with little
data. But buying furniture online is a special case of hard,
because the market is deliberately deceptive. Furniture sellers
actively prevent consumers from easily finding the same item at
other stores, or under other names, because this allows them to
charge more. The sellers get to name the products and they name
them in confusing ways to facilitate price discriminaton. For
example, this table at Wayfair
(https://www.wayfair.com/furniture/pdp/williston-forge-veroni...)
can also be found at Appliances Connection under a different name
for roughly half the price
(https://www.appliancesconnection.com/modway-eei2034brn.html). With
most online shopping, the products you want have unambiguous names
--if you want, say, a TV, you can simply search "Samsung 55 inch"
and see what both Best Buy and Walmart are charging. But with
furniture, sellers work actively to disrupt an accurate product
graph and keep the market inefficient. The net result is that
buying furniture feels icky, noisy, and predatorial. It is much
like buying a used car from a used-car salesperson might have felt
before Carmax. This is reflected in how much consumers hate the
industry: across 14 of the biggest furniture retailers the average
NPS is -11, compared with 37 for e-commerce as a whole. At the
same time, people are buying furniture online more than ever. It is
a $50B online market per year (roughly 1/3 Amazon, 1/3 Wayfair, and
1/3 everyone else) but it's nowhere possible to do a simple apples-
to-apples search for like items. Even on Wayfair, you can find the
same exact item with different names and prices. There's no reason
why furniture shopping online shouldn't have the same advantages
over going to a physical store that, say, shopping for a TV online
does. It just needs to become possible to search across the entire
catalog of furniture inventory. We encountered this problem when
Dane moved to New York and went through the labor of buying and
assembling an apartment's worth of furniture, only to discover that
one of his pieces of furniture was listed at another store but
called something completely different and sold for 50% less. We
discovered this behavior was pervasive among furniture sellers. We
devised a solution for a small set of items. Our findings generated
excitement in several threads on Reddit (here's one:
https://old.reddit.com/r/HomeDecorating/comments/s1oz0p/urba...).
Many users told similar stories of frustration and confusion
without a good solution and there was a lot of energy in these
reactions--it turns out that the feeling of being taken advantage
of is universally infuriating. At the time, we were working on a
tool to enable service professionals to grow their businesses. We
did not find an acute enough pain for our then-users. When we
started getting all these positive responses to exposing
exploitative discrepancies in the furniture market, we realized we
had hit on something people really care about, so we decided to
build Spoken. We crawl, scrape, and map product data and metadata
across 1,000+ furniture stores to connect the exact same product
across the internet. The mapping uses both algorithmic and human-
driven scoring to evaluate exact product matches. It can be tricky,
but it's doable, to determine which products are the same--in a
world of information abundance, there are many crumb trails. Often
photos are the same. We can't give away all the details here. But
we do also augment brute human pattern-matching with our own
tooling. We aggregate all retailers' inventory equally and surface
transparent results--without ads, business-preference, or leaving
out competitors. This means connecting Amazon, Google, Wayfair, and
the long tail of hundreds of regional furniture stores. Some
shopping comparison extensions and applications do in fact show
users some places that they can buy items--including some furniture
items--more cheaply. However, their business models involve
partnering with sellers, whom they give special treatment and won't
undercut. So they will only ever offer partial, not full
information. We've decided not to do this, as we believe that the
most efficient marketplace has a good chance to win in the end.
Our site is live, and free to use (https://www.spoken.io/). Our
next step will be to allow users to purchase directly on our site
across multiple stores to consolidate check out flows and avoid
marketing pop-ups and emails. We will charge a fee and offer users
an option to offset the environmental effect of their purchase. The
stores will fulfill the orders. We're eager to hear your feedback
and your experiences with the furniture market!
Author : lgabraham
Score : 81 points
Date : 2022-03-21 17:53 UTC (5 hours ago)
| bealuga wrote:
| I LOVE THIS! Been looking and hoping for something like this --
| I've been using reverse image search instead.
|
| One counterexample for something I've bought though:
| https://www.spoken.io/page/f7f35682-d0d3-4f2b-a917-43d8d4926...
| ($1599)
|
| https://www.burkedecor.com/products/goldie-media-console-by-...
| ($1279)
| imdane wrote:
| Great find! We'll attach this Burke Decor link to the product
| to help others save.
| pooloo wrote:
| This is certainly a tool I have been waiting for, as it
| simplifies what I do by spreadsheet.
|
| However, one additional step I do is find out of the products are
| also listed on Alibaba or similar. As you often can find a bed
| being sold by a large company in America for $5,000.00, and it is
| actually purchased from an Asian market as a set of multiples (4
| or 5) at $200.00/ea unit. Any chance of that being tracked as
| well?
| lgabraham wrote:
| Interesting point. We have only started to look into the
| international market and want to understand dimensions such as
| shipping costs, shipping times, quality, etc.
|
| We have considered also including secondary markets for the
| price-conscious.
|
| We love to hear that you were already doing this by
| spreadsheet. I hope soon we build the tools for you to
| transition entirely to our site!
| clcaev wrote:
| I'm looking for a plant wall, between 36" and 42" wide, 72"+
| high. It can be floating shelfs I mount on the wall, but ideally
| it's a stand-alone bookcase like unit.
|
| Is this the sort of quest your site would eventually solve?
| imdane wrote:
| Yes! Many home decor products and furnishings are also sold at
| these retailers, and we intend to add them to Spoken as well.
| layer8 wrote:
| I think the question was whether your search supports
| specifying search criteria like that. Because the lack of
| support for such searches is a major reason why looking for
| furniture online is often really tedious. One has to sift
| through hundreds of search results to determine the few
| products that might fit, or to find out that there's no
| product with the desired dimensions.
| imdane wrote:
| Ah, yes. I agree that this type of search currently falls
| flat. We are gathering product specs to be able run
| searches by dimensions, style, material, color, etc.
| shortly. I want a table that both looks beautiful and fits
| into the space I have in my apartment.
| pookeh wrote:
| Doesn't shopping.google.com already do this ?
| lgabraham wrote:
| They don't include Amazon links, for example. They also don't
| effectively connect all of Wayfair's links. These two sets
| alone comprise of roughly 60% of online furniture sales.
| applgo443 wrote:
| This is amazing! Do you also think the quality of the item
| delivered would be the same? Despite whatever website we go to? I
| know for a fact that 'same' electronic items sold at walmart are
| cheaper and are of slightly lower quality than those sold at home
| depot, etc.
| lgabraham wrote:
| The majority of the items we list today, we can trace them back
| directly to the distributor. We have blacklisted some selling
| websites based on low customer reviews.
| a9h74j wrote:
| I am sure you are correct in tracing things to distributors.
|
| FWIW, I had a long conversation with an ex-enginner who
| switched to selling European furniture in the US. He
| described European factories building steel-reinforced
| furniture on one shift for the European market, then on
| another shift flimsier too-thin-wood-reinforced versions for
| the US market.
|
| One easy hack can be to look from the bottom into e.g. a new
| sofa and reinforce sections which appear likely to sag over
| time.
| lgabraham wrote:
| Oh my, that is very strange and interesting. Thank you for
| this note!
| HellsMaddy wrote:
| Awesome! Congratulations on your launch.
|
| I noticed this exact phenomenon when shopping for a new armchair
| recently. I found one I liked on Wayfair but wasn't 100% sure
| yet, so I checked a few other sites. I stumbled across the same
| chair on Walmart under a different name for two thirds the price.
| When I got the chair, the box didn't include an assembly manual
| (and the chair was very finnicky to assemble), so I did a bit
| more searching and found it on _another_ site under yet another
| name, which provided a downloadable PDF assembly guide. Of
| course, the name on the assembly guide was also different, but it
| was the same chair.
|
| Can you share the most egregious price markup example you've
| seen? Are there certain product categories with more or less
| price divergence?
|
| P.s. I really like the "Load More" / "Load Forever" buttons. It's
| a small but appreciated detail that gives me a feeling that you
| care. It really fits with the overall theme of your business:
| giving your customers options so they can choose what works for
| them. The trend of "corporation knows best" is getting _really
| old_ , I'm glad to see people working to disrupt it.
| lgabraham wrote:
| What a crazy story! It makes me wonder if we can aggregate
| manuals, too.
|
| Soon, we'll allow you to sort by discount you can search
| yourself. In the meantime, I did find a set of outdoor
| furniture selling for ~$7,000 on Pier 1 Imports that you could
| buy on Amazon for ~$900. (Pier 1 did have it "on sale" for ~40%
| off, which is another dark pattern that is common in the
| space.)
|
| In general, I find items that get marked up the most are:
| outdoor furniture, mirrors, and simple metal-and-wood items
| like coffee tables, shelves or desks.
| HellsMaddy wrote:
| Oh, yes, the "sales". I found a mattress pad on Wayfair that
| I was interested in, but I felt it a bit weird that it was
| "70% off". I loaded the product page in the Wayback machine
| and found that it's _always_ between 50-75% off, and that the
| base price fluctuates by $20-40. Weird stuff.
| lgabraham wrote:
| The "sales," yes. Once we have enough price data to show
| how "sales" change over time, we might be able to help
| users plan their purchases. Some "sales" are evergreen,
| while some are episodic but also predictable.
| BlameKaneda wrote:
| Cool site!
|
| I typed "desk" into the search bar and came across posts with
| desk in the name, e.g. _Four Hands Edna Desk Chair-Fedora
| Oatmeal_ (https://www.spoken.io/page/f8420225-c2ba-4048-8454-e4e3
| a897a...), as well as items that weren't desks (such as
| _Signature Design by Ashley Hyndell Dresser, Brown_ (https://www.
| spoken.io/page/b0d3e420-34ef-43fe-b7ca-3066f0c98...)).
|
| I also noticed that there wasn't an option to filter the posts by
| furniture type. I don't know if the metadata of each item keeps
| track of the type of item that it is, but if so then you could
| add a type filter.
| lgabraham wrote:
| Thank you. Our search is currently fairly fuzzy. We're refining
| search intent over time. We just introduced filtering, and plan
| to add more dimensions in time.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| I'm unlikely to buy furniture new ever again because of the
| shenanigans you describe. Facebook Marketplace and others seem to
| be good but can be difficult if you don't have a pickup truck or
| van.
| lgabraham wrote:
| I understand your disillusionment. I certainly respect those
| who choose to buy used.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I was skeptical, but this is really cool!
|
| Small, nerdy question: how do you decide the canonical name for
| an item that is called different things from different retailers?
| imdane wrote:
| Fun question! If we can, we assign the name that's within the
| context of the seller you're looking at. So, if the table is
| called the Kirby Entryway Table at Urban Outfitters, we call it
| that when you're looking at the table though an Urban
| Outfitters search. If not, we use the more commonly used name
| for the product. In this case, that would be the Sauder North
| Avenue Console Table, which includes the manufacturer /
| distributor name.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| anandchowdhary wrote:
| This is a very interesting problem! I'm the cofounder of Pabio
| (YC S21), we do rent-to-own furniture with interior design, and
| one of the things I've observed is the vast discrepancy in prices
| on different websites but also at different times (much like
| predatory flight ticket pricing). Super excited to see more
| companies innovate to disrupt the traditional furniture industry!
| Best of luck and stay in touch!
| lgabraham wrote:
| Yes, prices change often, and by a lot! We are considering
| price tracking as a future feature.
|
| Renting-to-own is an interesting and important alternative to
| purchasing. Best of luck to you, too! We're always open to
| share things we've learned!
| jeromechoo wrote:
| This is awesome. Noticed you mentioned building an accurate
| product graph. Do you use a knowledge graph behind the scenes to
| find lookalikes?
| imdane wrote:
| Yes, we're developing a knowledge graph to score products and
| represent naming patterns we see across retailers. For
| instance, the Kirby line at Urban Outfitters is the Curiod line
| at Walmart and the North Avenue Collection at Amazon.
| zwieback wrote:
| This seems cool, we bought a bunch of semi-cheap furniture for a
| vacation place so I could see how this is useful.
|
| One question I have: how can you be sure "exact same product" is
| really the same. One item from Wayfair had a defect and I asked
| for a spare part (seat of a chair). The article came and looked
| the same but had different hole patterns and even threads. I had
| to redrill a bunch of holes to make it work.
|
| Building in some kind of feedback loop for this kind of problem
| would seem really important to me.
| lgabraham wrote:
| Thanks. Many of our items we can trace directly back to the
| distributor.
|
| The question about replacement parts is interesting, and maybe
| more difficult. We may not solve it directly.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| A cursory search for sectionals (something I'm currently in the
| market for) had appliancesconnection.com as the consistently
| cheapest place to buy from. So what's the catch with them, why
| are they so cheap? I buy from Wayfair and other "trusted sites"
| because they have a rapport, brand, and good return policy.
|
| I think your site should offer more features like a way to
| validate the sellers or compare them somehow. Read the fine
| print/do the due diligence for me. Also, are you sure they're
| selling the exact same furniture and not something that has
| dings/was previously rejected and sold to these budget companies
| like TJ Maxx etc do?
| lgabraham wrote:
| Based on our research, they have very positive customer
| reviews. (Appliance Connection has 4.5/5 stars on Trust Pilot,
| where Wayfair has 1.4/5 stars.)
|
| Yes, we couldn't agree more regarding seller comparisons, and
| on the ability to compare across many dimensions. A way we
| think about this is that the price you are willing to pay might
| vary by the experience you expect to have. We have in mind
| something like Hipmunk's agony index. With a tool like that,
| users can decide how much more they would pay to avoid a
| possible bad experience.
| evan_ wrote:
| There was an unfounded conspiracy theory[1] spread in 2020
| about Wayfair that continues[2] to affect its review scores.
| Also, many of the positive reviews from Appliances Connection
| are marked as having been solicited by Appliances Connection
| itself[3].
|
| I've never used either site so maybe Appliances Connection
| _is_ actually that much better than Wayfair but I don 't
| think I would necessarily draw that conclusion from the
| Trustpilot results. [1]:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-53416247 [2]:
| https://www.trustpilot.com/reviews/6212e0afbc5a51af69c88c9c
| [3]: https://www.trustpilot.com/review/appliancesconnection.c
| om?stars=5
| lgabraham wrote:
| Great points and excellent research. It impresses upon us
| the importance of diversifying the source of our reviews
| and ratings, and introducing our own means of validating
| sellers.
| saberworks wrote:
| Neat idea and I hope you will be successful. On initial
| inspection it seems like your matching algo or something is off.
| First example I clicked on is this dining set, which sounded like
| a great deal: https://www.spoken.io/page/11DmKO6MxLYnRP0tRls8 for
| $680. But when I click through it's actually $688 and only
| includes the table (is not a set as originally claimed):
| https://www.theclassyhome.com/Product/JFN-1511-82/Jofran+Fur...
|
| Same with the higher price linked on your site. It's still only
| the table and it's out of stock.
| https://www.afastores.com/jofran-cannon-valley-trestle-dinin...
|
| I think it's less frustrating browsing sites directly because
| their prices and stock indicators are more accurate. I get this
| with google shopping results, too, where you click through and
| either the price was totally wrong or the item is out of stock.
| gk1 wrote:
| This is awesome. I think you've hit the nail on your head with
| your problem statement.
|
| I recently helped a relative furnish a new home, and the process
| of shopping for furniture online was _worse_ than buying a car
| online, exactly for the reason you described. I thought Wayfair
| is the only retailer that changes product names, but found out
| high-end stores like Crate & Barrel do the same thing (and
| charge 2x).
|
| The process was so bad that we stopped shopping, and the home
| remains only half furnished. Maybe now we can get back to it...
| imdane wrote:
| Thanks! Isn't it wild? The more we dig into the problem, the
| more we find. Hopefully, you're able to fill your home now!
| kepler1 wrote:
| This is admirable, but seems much more difficult! With
| electronics, there are a handful of brands and products if you
| look at a particular piece of equipment. Specs are probably well
| scrape-able. The dimensions of a TV are not easy to fake/confuse.
|
| With furniture, even the definition of the article/product is not
| always clear, and there are hundreds of small companies making
| similar items, and differentiation in features or design that is
| often not visible / you have to lay hands on it to figure out
| what the difference in quality is (unless you're going for some
| kind of nameplate item that is easily recognizable, like an Eames
| chair). Or the addition of some _extra_ feature changes the
| nature of the product.
|
| I think the difficulty is like trying to create a clothing
| aggregation engine if you took all the designer labels off the
| items. On the other hand, if they are truly interchangeable maybe
| that's all the more reason they can be compared. But, somehow I
| think people are more opinionated about finding the right piece
| of furniture that costs $1000 and not believing that the one from
| some non-brand website is the one they're looking for.
|
| I'm sure you've encountered all these issues, and I'm no expert.
| I will be interested to watch how it goes!
| lgabraham wrote:
| It certainly is more complicated, and you bring up many good
| points.
|
| One thing working in our favor is that relatively few
| manufacturers make a lot of furniture that is sold. There are
| few suppliers and many channels, which means that often items
| are truly interchangeable.
|
| It is also the case that the stores with the cheapest prices
| tend to be recognizable big box brands (Home Depot, Lowes,
| etc.) not necessarily no-name stores.
|
| Some suppliers control their channels better, especially in the
| high end of the market. And there are D2C furniture brands that
| don't sell through channels at all. We do hope to offer these
| stores a way to sell through our marketplace via an easy API.
|
| It certainly is the case that buying furniture is more
| emotional in a way buying a TV is not. We do want to honor this
| in how our site is organized.
| bredren wrote:
| If you end up doing content marketing, it would be
| interesting to learn more about where "cheap" furniture is
| getting made and profiles of the people who make it.
|
| Not to dig on manufactured furniture but because the labels
| do a decent job of hiding these folks work.
| qnsi wrote:
| Wow! I am right now in the furniture market and wasnt really
| aware of this problem!
|
| I actually found another problem that is also very annoying, at
| least where I live. I had specific items from my architect, but I
| wanted to touch most of the things before buying. Had to call 10
| shops for each item to ask if they have it on exposition!
|
| Harder to make money on this, and not sure if this problem is in
| USA but so annoying for buyers
| imdane wrote:
| Inventory is a big one too. We're working on a way to show you
| who has what in stock and how many are available. By location
| would be amazing! What were you buying?
| qnsi wrote:
| It was big issue when buying sanitary equipment (not sure if
| thats the word: faucets, toilet etc, shower). It was mostly
| because of Roca selling through 3rd party shops with physical
| locations. Every location had like 5% of whole catalogue so a
| lot of calling to find even a few things.
|
| After that, I did a lot of buying without touching things.
| Also bought a lot of IKEA because seriously I got fedup with
| the whole experience of buying furniture
| imdane wrote:
| Argh, I feel your frustration. When this idea originated, I
| was so aggravated by the whole experience. I do think that
| the market is moving toward buying without touching, but
| your ability to trust the quality and fit for your home is
| still too low.
| mglowe wrote:
| Wow-what a cool site! It's super fast and i love the cheeky "load
| forever"
| imdane wrote:
| Thanks! Hopefully, furniture buying can be a little less dull
| now.
| lukeahn wrote:
| Great idea. I have been experiencing the same pain points in
| furniture buying. I sincerely hope that you will solve the
| problem.
|
| You've just launched the site, so some site issues are
| understandable... I have found some misleading price tags.
|
| https://www.spoken.io/page/cbf0bdd0-81bb-485b-975b-068bdeab3...
| is currently showing $1,199 at English Elm but
| https://englishelm.com/products/moes-home-vancouver-display-...
| is actually $1,499.
| lgabraham wrote:
| Thank you for pointing this out. We are currently updating our
| prices every week. Indeed, this isn't quick enough for how
| quickly the sellers change prices, and especially given by how
| much they sometimes change them.
| mattstudio wrote:
| Really cool idea! And I love how fast the site is. I wish the
| filters were a bit better so I could search for a couch of a
| certain width or material. Do you expect people to first find a
| piece of furniture they like on another website then come to
| spoken.io to make sure they get the best price?
| imdane wrote:
| Thanks! We just added filtering this week and plan to expand it
| across many dimensions: color, material, size, etc. We see two
| primary use cases: (1) price check an item they already know
| about and (2) want to discover new items since it can be
| tedious to look at inventory across multiple sites.
| lgabraham wrote:
| We hope to become the best place to discover furniture online.
| Today, it is more likely that someone might use us to make sure
| they are aware of the best price. We do have a Chrome extension
| to "take with you" to this end.
| claudiulodro wrote:
| Maybe my experience simply isn't representative of the average
| persons', since before I was a developer I was a professional
| furniture maker and upholsterer, but the issue I have is
| generally not the price. Like, it's not a huge deal if a
| bookshelf is $200 vs if it's $300 since the cost will be
| "amortized" over a decade or more of use. Furniture is an
| investment in quality-of-life.
|
| The issue I have, especially with online shopping, is determining
| whether something is cheapo junk. The quality of most online
| furniture, especially on Amazon, is so bad, and it seems like
| 90%+ of the marketplace is heavily "cost-engineered"
| (particleboard instead of wood, thin tubing instead of rails,
| cheapest vinyl available, etc.). Junk at a great deal is better
| than junk at a bad deal, but the real problem with online
| furniture shopping is determining whether something is junk in
| the first place.
| eterm wrote:
| Unfortunately the inability to easily determine the quality
| while shopping online, as well as the long re-purchase times
| with furniture, drives everything to be junk.
|
| Anything you won't replace within 5 years means the same
| "brand" names and models won't exist next time you purchase so
| there's no incentive for any quality whatsoever, and the
| inability to determine quality is a classic lemon market
| scenario.
| lgabraham wrote:
| It is a fair point. In making this site, I have come to respect
| quality furniture makers most of all.
|
| I do think there is a place for cheap furniture. Not just as
| junk, but as a piece of a home when someone doesn't have the
| budget they wish to have. While there is a place for cheap
| furniture, there is not a place for overpriced cheap furniture.
|
| I do also think that if shoppers can feel confident they are
| getting the best prices, then they might upgrade the quality of
| they are buying within a given price range. We just help them
| buy better quality furniture at their price point.
|
| We do intend to add reviews at the product level that will help
| users discern quality. Where there is enough data, we can even
| gather interesting data like: what were the reviews of a given
| item at a given price?
| wdewind wrote:
| How do you handle scraping 1000+ different store websites at
| scale? Isn't it an enormous amount of work just to maintain the
| scrapers?
| lgabraham wrote:
| Yes it is an enormous amount of work. We do update retailers at
| different frequencies. The overall inventory gets updated once
| a week.
| ICodeSometimes wrote:
| This is awesome! Would be great if the filter functionality could
| let you filter on functionality (bedroom, dining, etc..) and
| color palette.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I shared this with some friends on Slack, and the response was
| "another price aggregator, but for furniture? Okay..."
|
| When you explained the problem in your HN post description, I got
| really excited about the product. But, I don't see that same
| story communicated on your website anywhere. I'm sure you've
| thought about this, but: tell users what you are doing
| differently on the website.
| lgabraham wrote:
| Wow, great feedback. It has been difficult to distill the
| problem in a concise way.
|
| Would you mind if I asked: how might you do this?
| karaterobot wrote:
| How about a little graphic that shows the exact same piece
| for sale at two different prices, with two different names.
| Then, the text says something like: "Retailers try to sell
| the same furniture for different prices just by changing the
| name. Spoken finds the best price for furniture, no matter
| what it's called."
|
| Marketing is obviously not my strong suit, but that is what I
| understand the value of your product to be!
| lgabraham wrote:
| Thank you! We did have something like this on our site for
| some time. We recently simplified our language. You have
| pointed out for us that something was lost.
|
| We did make these fun Instagram posts:
|
| https://www.instagram.com/p/CYnOJt8lk08/?utm_source=ig_web_
| c...
|
| https://www.instagram.com/p/CY5DOoyvFUk/?utm_source=ig_web_
| c...
| jonathankoren wrote:
| As someone that recently had ur chased a couch, and will be
| looking to purchase new furniture soon, there's been several pain
| points.
|
| 1) Furniture seems to have bifurcated. There's the expensive
| stuff that you can only get from one place, and there's the very
| cheap drop ship stuff that dominates search results.
|
| 1b) It's hard to find things that aren't midcentury. I understand
| it's popular now, but I really don't want my living room look
| like my grandmother's.
|
| 2) For some things, like beds and couches, you really need to sit
| on them to decide. Firmness, sit height, and how the back tilts
| or bulges really make or break of a piece of furniture, and
| unfortunately they don't translate into text well.
|
| Sure you a quick return program could help, but getting a guy to
| bring you three couches is a bit insane.
| imdane wrote:
| Agreed. 1) We'd love to have more non- midcentury inventory and
| be able to filter based on style / design. Tbh, most of the
| things we call midcentury aren't but are categorized that way.
| 2) We are also working to aggregate inventory availability
| across stores as well, so you'll be able to see if a location
| near you sells that item, and you can go test it out.
| lgabraham wrote:
| Interesting points. Our site does, for now, mainly aggregate
| the stuff that can be found at more than one place. We don't
| think all of it is merely cheap.
|
| We found that we ourselves sometimes became "siloed" in styles.
| One goal we have is to help our users understand their style
| preferences, whatever style this is.
|
| We do believe that younger generations will become more
| comfortable purchasing things without seeing them. More can be
| done to increase this comfort, like being able to quickly
| visualize a piece of furniture in your room, and having some
| way to qualify difficult-to-see elements like firmness, etc.
| awillen wrote:
| I just have to say that the links to the same table on Wayfair
| and Appliance Direct is one of the most concise, effective ways
| I've seen of describing the pain point that you're solving. Just
| looking at that has me 100% convinced that what you're building
| has real value.
| lgabraham wrote:
| Thank you very much.
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