Welfurn strives to become an eco-system in the space of customised home furniture. It will aggregate the key stake holders of the trade such as Designers, Studios (showrooms), Manufacturers, Vendors and Carpenters on one robust platform which has, at its very core, an indigenously developed software technology. The technology apparently is the factor which separates Welfurn from other competitors.
There were a few important challenges which, until Welfurn’s technology – 'Wishboard' came into existence, remained unattended. Welfurn’s Wishboard offers an AutoCAD based design platform which, by virtue of being AutoCAD based, is extremely easy for interior designers to adapt to. It offers a library of standard and customisable models which can be simply dragged and dropped by the designer on the drawing space. It also contains Welfurn’s wide range of finishes, colours and accessories to choose from. Furthermore, Wishboard handles the relationships and validations between different products and models thus reducing possibility of errors. Such errors may cause transactional confusions between designers, studios and customers. Above all Wishboard also generates accurate quotations and various reports required for sourcing on click of a button. These features of Wishboard ease the humongous operational troubles all the stake holders would otherwise face. Armed with this path breaking technology Welfurn plans to create an ecosystem of 100 studios and 2000 Interior Design Partners in tier 1 ,2 and 3 cities starting with Bangalore, spreading to the rest of south and then to the rest of the country. In that endeavor three such studios are coming up and one is already up and running in Bangalore.
With this Welfurn is ready for its next round of funding.
The founders of Welfurn struggled with the invention of such a solution for almost half a decade. After many failures, or stepping stones, when breakthrough was within striking range, the core team first invested time and money into developing and fine tuning the technology. Finally, in May 16, when the development reached maturity stage the business commenced with
a seed fund of USD 500,000.
To begin with,
Welfurn’s business model is based on online lead generation and offline handling. For this Welfurn depends heavily on its website, informative AV content, SEO, SMM and all kind of digital presence and traction. When the leads get generated a pre-sale call centre curates the lead and assigns it to one of Welfurn’s affiliated and trained Design Partner. The customers are then handled in a traditional way. Their sites are visited and they are also taken to one of Welfurn’s affiliated studios where they could touch and feel the products.
Welfurn currently has one operating studio and three upcoming studios in Bangalore. Gradually, the plan is to proactively spread the studio and designer network in southern India and subsequently in the other parts of the country. Within two years Welfurn intends to build a network of hundred studios supported by two thousand affiliated designers. In its first month of operations Welfurn has
booked a business of 18 lacs by generating 90 online leads.
The
idea of Welfurn was conceived by the trio Mahesh, Rahul and Nilay. They have worked together for more than seven years however their coinciding stint with one of the startups in this domain ignited their association. Having spent more than two decades in the industry they had a fair idea of its immense potential however they always saw the absence of technology as a big hindrance to scalability. Already having built a successful B2B brand – Elenza, which serves hundreds of furniture retailers country-wide, Mahesh Shah is a well-known name in wood working industry. Nilay Karambelkar, on the other hand, can be easily termed as one of the first generation professionals in Modular Furniture industry and has worked with a few leading brands across verticals. Rahul Shah too has previous entrepreneurial experience in this space coupled with tenures in Elenza and Homelane.com.
