Furniture
I have a long term ambition to run some kind of furniture business. We all need furniture whether it is as simple as packing crates to sit on or gold inlaid antique tables by Mr Chippendale.
Whether you run an old fashioned furniture shop or an innovative website that allows customers to design their own pieces for you to manufacture and deliver this is a business that will bring practical every day items to consumers and most importantly make them happy.
You don’t need to know a lot about furniture to know that there are two main costs, labour to manufacture it and transportation. The likes of MFI and Ikea addressed the transportation issue by flat packing furniture to allow for maximum space utilisation in shipping containers. The labour issue was addressed by manufacturing using machines which don’t unionise or take sick days. Not a bad model except that almost everyone ended up with the same furniture.
The age of the internet has brought us more choice in almost everything, there is no need to ever shop at Ikea again if you can visualise measurements and trust the quality of something that you have only seen in a photo. Even if this is not your ideal way to buy furniture you can, and people do order from overseas where the labour costs are cheaper and ship back more than you need so that the other pieces can be sold for a profit.
Assuming that you find a suitable supplier and some pieces that you like you can distribute in the following ways: -
Networking
Ebay
Website
Drive around in a van
Shop
Friends and family are the easiest people to talk to when we first start a new business, even if they don’t buy they are likely to want to see what you are selling, understand what the prices are and recommend you to their friends and colleagues. Give your immediate circle some discount vouchers to either use or hand on to their customers and do the same for people who buy from you. The incentive to do someone else a favour as well as showing off their new furniture should ensure you more quality referrals.
Ebay has over 6000 items listed under Chair in furniture and 2,329 under dining table with a further 1171 for wardrobe. In short there is plenty of stock out there for you to compete against. The good news is that a search for “pine dining table” only yields 34 results in other words despite the amount of competition customers can find what they are looking for.
196 million results for “furniture” make this a very competitive item on Google. Narrowing down to “pine dining table” still generates over 1.3 million results. Build a website to sell furniture and you had better be prepared to promote it seriously. You can of course take the route of www.horizoninterior.cn who have paid Google for an advert at the top of a search for Furniture. Other than this you can pay for advertising, use PR activities, or Guerrilla marketing to get people to view your site, and hopefully buy from you.
Friends in the UK tell me that they regularly get Asians with vans full of furniture driving around their village. Prices are low compared to the big stores and of course you can get great quality items that are not the same as everyone else’s. Personally I think a catalogue posted through doors would be just as effective if you are prepared to deliver but maybe the chance to touch and feel is the clincher after all.
The problem with opening a store for furniture is the stock. You either have to have a huge store, or a huge storage space, or both. The alternative is to do what they do in Hong Kong and have design studios where you keep catalogues of available stock but insist on a minimum delivery time of 4-6 weeks to allow for shipping. This effectively allows you to manufacture to order or simply store your stock offshore where rents are lower. I know a couple of great shops in Vietnam that use this approach with a limited amount of display furniture to great effect and this is the model I would adopt if I ever get around to opening a furniture shop. If you take the order now deliver later route and carry no stock you can get started for a modest investment, go the full stock route and you are looking at a couple of hundred thousand US$ to get going.
Personally I would travel to China, Vietnam, Indonesia or somewhere similar and meet with manufacturers and suppliers. Find someone you want to work with and talk about terms for ordering shipping and storage.
This is not a low cost business and if you are not prepared to invest in a couple of trips overseas then it probably is not for you. You could of course order furniture a piece or two at a time and re-sell on or off-line.
You will need somewhere to store the furniture that you have yet to sell
You will need some kind of transportation, think about a minivan where the seats can come out or fold flat, a pick up truck or how about a convertible car?