In its hope of turning profitable in 2017, online furniture marketplace Pepperfry extended its last mile delivery service to 400 cities in September. Recently big ecommerce marketplaces Such as Flipkart and Amazon have got into the online furniture space, but Pepperfry doesn’t fear and strongly feels that they are only expanding the market for speciality firms. Similarly, challenges like webrooming are simply taken in its stride. In July, Pepperfry raised a further Rs. 640 crore in funding, to put it in a strong financial position.
Pepperfry has now announced that it has earmarked $10 million to make strategic investments and take over companies that will give it a competitive advantage, in order to help the company grow and gain a larger market share. It has also kept aside a marketing budget of Rs.200 crore for 2016.
“We are looking to make strategic investments in, or acquire, companies that synergise with our business, in the areas of supply chain, augmented reality and those that can help us build local designer ecosystems in cities that we are present in. We are in advanced stages of talks and expect to close two deals in a couple of months,” said Ambareesh Murty, founder-CEO, Pepperfry.
In the last quarter, Pepperfry achieved a Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) of RS. 750 crore and is expecting to reach RS. 1,000 crore by March 2016.The icing on the cake is that globally in the furniture category it is reportedly only second to Swedish furniture giants IKEA, in terms of web traffic and way ahead of the competition in India.
Pepperfry claims to have a 50% share of the estimated Rs. 300 million online furniture market in India. The overall furniture industry in the country is approximately worth a cool $30 billion and so there is plenty of room for improvement. Pepperfry has opened six physical stores, with a floor space of up to 3,500 sq ft. A further four more stores in the next 4 months are planned. These are expected to come up in Hyderabad, Chennai, Bengaluru and Mumbai.
“We have established a clear lead over competition in the last 12 months and are confident of scaling even faster in the next 12 months” said Murty.
Editor team is specialized in introducing the marketplace content targeting the Indian online sellers. They plan and coordinate to bring the appealing content for the small businesses on how to partner with the e-commerce sites like Amazon and Flipkart and strategies for improving their online business.
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