Cushions
When I lived in Vietnam everyone I knew had lots and lots of cushions. There were cushions on sofas, beds, the floor; they were everywhere. The reason I guess was more to do with the fact that they were ludicrously cheap rather than any great home design fad. Silk in Vietnam (whilst not 100% pure) is very affordable and comes in a vast array of colours, so even simple block colour cushions were attractive.
Ikea (US) has a basic cushion for $0.99 and covers start at $4.99 and go all the way up to $15.99. You can also get a better quality cushion for $4.99 making the most expensive Ikea cushion a whopping $20.98 and the cheapest $5.98. I couldn’t beat the cheapest on Ebay but then again I wouldn’t have it in my house it was nasty.
I would be tempted to build a business based on cushion covers not cushions as they are less bulky and thus cheaper to ship. You could then “match” Ikeas prices by simply buying cushions from Ikea and including them as a full cushion for those customers who want them, or of course you could buy your cushions from Ikea and add a buck to them after all you are having to go down to the store and are saving your customers a trip.
As usual the key will be in marketing your products.
Ebay
Website
Advertise
Furniture stores
Interior designers
Ebay is competitive with about 4000 items listed under a search for cushion, but many of these are for rings, dog and cat cushions etc. Some more advanced searching will bring you down to a mere 1000 or so. OK so it won’t be easy to get noticed but you can get spotted with perseverance or simply because you come out at the top of the “time left to expiry” list.
Similarly there are 10 million results for “Cushions” on Google and 1.4 million for “cushion covers”. Building a website is the easy part, you can get a nice free shopping cart and be up and running for little if any cost but getting people to come to your site is the tricky bit. I did notice that no-one has yet paid for the top two adverts under the search for “cushion” however and the top ranked site is a Wikipedia item so it is probably not that hard to get noticed if you are prepared to invest in it. The alternative is that you promote the website in your day to day activities and build traffic over time.
Advertising, whether it be in the local newspaper, interior design magazines, or online; will bring you customers faster than just about anything else. Set yourself a strict budget and work within it to test different media, styles of advert and sizes in printed adverts. You will need to learn what works best for you and this may take several months to get right. Don’t overlap campaigns unless you are sure that you can track the different responses, e.g. only website on one ad and telephone on another.
Furniture stores may be willing to carry your cushions, particularly if you are happy to provide made up cushions as opposed to just covers. Made up cushions automatically look more expensive than covers and you know how cheap you can get the fillings, the question is just whether you can be bothered to put the fillings into the covers….or pay someone else to.
Interior designers are always on the look out for something new. If you have access to some unusual coloured plain silk, satin or textured covers and are prepared to sell just a few at a time then you could become the interior designers best friend. You will need to make some calls and do some lunches to get going but with good stock you should find it a breeze.
As suggested above, I would not try to get cushion fillings any cheaper than Ikea, or similar home furnishing stores. Even if you can find them cheaper you will probably have to order large quantities, and what are you going to do, fill a barn?
Cushion covers can be sourced from www.alibaba.com or similar sites, or you can just search for something like “cushion covers China” or “cushion covers Vietnam” which have 1.2million results and 370,000 results respectively on Google.
Try to find a supplier who is not intent on sending you an entire 40 foot container load. If you can’t find one then ask whether they ship to any wholesalers or agents within their home country (or yours).
You really could do this by buying covers from Ebay, fillings from Ikea and then re-selling the finished cushion
Once you find a market you can pay people to do the boring stuff like going to Ikea and putting fillings into covers.
If you source from overseas then you have a great excuse to go on an exotic holiday to check out possible stock. In fact it’s not a bad way to start out if you pick up a suitcase full of nice covers while you are next abroad.