Celebrating the Home-Maker
At a time when e-commerce brands are attempting to woo customers by offering the biggest discounts, FabFurnish has reached out to them with the promise of helping them set up their dream home. Ankita Dabas, Co-Founder & CEO of FabFurnish.com, tells us how the brand is moving away from a product focus to inspiration and design focus, which is reflected in their new ad campaign By NEETA NAIR Q] What was the thought behind FabFurnish’s ‘Mrs India ka Ghar’ campaign? Setting up a beautiful home takes more than just furniture; the perfect home needs inspiration and a personality of its own. While FabFurnish has always been a pioneer in online retail, of late we thought it necessary to directly connect with our ultimate user-- the self-reliant, independent woman who plays multiple roles in everyday life. We wanted to celebrate the spirit of that woman who multitasks and yet manages to set up that warm and cosy space for her family and friends. We are telling these women how we fit into their lives as a brand, asking them to make us their partner in this journey of creating a home. Q] Why have you chosen to stay away from television as a medium for advertising this time? We found that around 60-70% people watching TV are also simultaneously active on another device, like a mobile. So the distraction levels are high. We are thus focusing majorly on social media and YouTube and not targeting television as of now. Q] What is your strategy when it comes to the digital medium? The first video ‘Mrs India ka Ghar’ is just an initiation. FabFurnish has entered the realm of designing inspiration for your home. We have developed some engagement tools for our customers which will be introduced to them in a series of videos all the way till December. This is also an initiation for our new brand image, personality and company which will result in overall spends of around 50 lakh in this festive season. Q] You have introduced a new segment –Fab makeover – on your website. What kind of response is that getting? As we are in the process of moving from product focus to design focus, we started a feature called ‘Fab design services’ a few weeks ago, to give our customers an inspiration for their home. Here you can choose whatever you like and our in-house designers will help you create the same theme in your home. Based on your real-life inspiration, we share style boards and mood boards with you, and once you have decided on a particular look, we do a custom layout for your house. It would include everything from placement of furniture, to flooring, the entire caveat of services to set up a room or home for you. We give you delegated shopping lists as well. The services will be provided virtually, with consultation over the phone and home visits in the last stage because we want it to be scalable as well. We are looking at providing a pan India service; basically, to make FabFurnish a one-stop solution for you. Q] Where does most of your business come from and how are you marketing FabFurnish in the smaller towns? For us, most of the business comes from the metros because online transactions have to do with availability of Internet services and adaptability to purchasing online. Also, our services are of greater value for the customers in metros because they don’t have the time to take their car out on a weekend and go to five-six stores to find that perfect sofa. What we have to offer is convenience. Q] Do your marketing efforts come under the same umbrella for all verticals and products? How do you manage the communication for them? We have a 360-degree approach and most of our marketing efforts are now going to be engagement-oriented; whether we are doing an offline event by engaging a set of vendors, designers, consumers together, or social event where we will be showcasing the versatility of our design services or on YouTube where we will be consistently introducing the new features added to our website. We also have a make-over series where we go to people’s homes and re-do it completely or certain parts of it. So you will see certain unknown faces getting associated with us on a regular basis. We are personalizing it because we don’t want our consumers to feel that they are interacting with a system. They should know that someone is putting thought and effort into it. Q] Many people browse for designs on online stores and then take them to furniture marts because they like to touch and feel their furniture before buying it. How are you tackling this challenge? We understand that this is the nature of an average Indian buyer. To tackle that we are moving into the realm of hyper-local, this involves local delivery and local commerce. Here we will be connecting you to the local vendor as well. If you’re a user and are looking for a product on our website, you can see where it is available and go and buy it from there. So you can actually visit the store to get a feel of the furniture you have set your heart on. That way, you can either buy it from the store or through the FabFurnish website. Also, with the help of a QR code- a code on the product that can be scanned - customers can place the furniture virtually in their homes to see how it would look before making a purchase. Q] In what phase of execution is this hyper-local marketplace that you are offering to your consumers? It has started quite vigorously in NCR right now and by December, we will have at least 50 vendors each in Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai who will be able to offer this service as FabFurnish partners. We are taking it from online to local and vice versa. So even if you are offline and not surfing our website, you can still discover the FabFurnish furniture or purchase it by directly visiting our stores. Q] What differentiates you from your competitors in the e-commerce space? We’re all in one and not just restricted to furniture. We will connect our users to everything they need in a home, be it flooring services, or paint service, furniture, décor or design consultation. We’ve already reached out to 700 interior designers and partnered with 300 of them. In paints, we have a tie-up with Asian Paints. We are a discovery platform for curated products within your vicinity. That’s too long a tagline so we say, ‘Everything home within your vicinity’. Q] What is that one market that is contributing greatly to the growth of the brand? There are two ways of looking at it. Geographically, within three cities we cover about 60% of our revenue, i.e., from Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. If you’re looking at it category-wise, then the biggest category is the living room and bedroom category. Q] What are the challenges you face while marketing the brand? If I had to name one, it would be brand repositioning. We are definitely doing away with deep discounting because as a brand we don’t want to be known for the best deals in town. We want to be known for the best products. Thus we’re moving towards content engagement focus and a discovery platform. ABOUT THE BRAND FabFurnish.com is one of India’s leading home furnishing & design websites. The company is now launching a content based online platform for discovery and retail of curated home furnishing in India. Touted as ‘Your Home-maker’, FabFurnish.com offers a wide, international-quality product portfolio in affordable and premium range comprising an assortment of one lakh versatile home furniture, furnishings and décor products. FACTS CREATIVE AGENCY: CONCEPTUALIZED IN-HOUSE PR AGENCY: PR PUNDIT CMO FILE Ankita Dabas is the Co-Founder & CEO of FabFurnish.com and holds a Master’s Degree in Business Administration from University of Rochester, New York. She has a diverse decade-long work experience in angel investing, private equity and investment banking with leading private equity fund, AIF Capital and investment banks including J P Morgan and Merrill Lynch. At FabFurnish.com, Ankita brings on board her expertise in strategic business planning and execution and financial management with a vision to steer the brand into its next phase of growth and evolution. MARKETING TIP For online marketing, video is the way to go. But make sure that your video is not just visible but also searchable Feedback: neeta.nair@exchange4media.com
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