Home Furnishings Marketplace Chairish Designs Its Future; Focuses On Customer, Payments Experience

After not only surviving — but thriving — through a year of unprecedented and unpredictable pandemic-related turmoil, vintage home furnishings marketplace Chairish is focusing on things it can actually control, like knowing its niche and improving the customer experience.

The San Francisco-based company, which Co-Founder and President Anna Brockway launched in 2013, now has over 525,000 items posted on its site in what has been described as a virtual marketplace of treasures, vintage furniture, art and home accessories.

After a year that she said gave her “whiplash” with its downs (March-May) and ups (May-December), the company is well into 2021 with an emphasis on its designers and its customers as it prepares for a world in which consumers will most likely head out of their homes more and maybe even back to the office.

As Brockway said in a conversation with PYMNTS’ Karen Webster, her seven-year stint with Levi Strauss as vice president of worldwide marketing familiarized her with the importance of design and the key points of maintaining relationships with designers.

“I sort of think of interior designers, probably the way that Nike thinks of athletes,” she said. “So, we like to think of them as being the personalities that are leading the industry.”

To that point, Chairish has packaged-up its designers within a curated feature it calls “Design Insiders” to help ordinary customers navigate the process while serving as a forum for its increasingly important professional clientele. As Brockway said, an important part of what Chairish has built addresses the designer sitting at his or her desk. They are what make Chairish the primary resource for its clients.

Just as the Nike parallels work for Chairish’s designers, Chairish also draws comparisons to another digital-first star: Peloton. If providing digital access to celebrity trainers has made Peloton what it is today, then providing remote access to celebrity designers is doing the same for Chairish. That’s because there is such a diverse range of perspectives and aesthetics within the design community, it has become a part of the business Chairish is looking to develop.

“So, in the long run, what I imagine is starting to build kind of a constellation of talent that lives within the brand, personalities really, that can help take this pantry of ingredients and start serving up some really beloved recipes and directions for people,” Brockway said.

Fun And Chic But Not Judgy

As a lifelong home decorating aficionado, Brockway said she has always bristled that parts of the business — particularly the high end — often felt intimidating, an unwelcoming vibe that she also said often exists in the art world. The original idea behind Chairish was to bring fun and adventure back to the home decorating space — a better, different version of eBay that got its start selling antiques and collectibles on its platform. That eBay analogy is especially prescient now that Chairish has added former eBay Chief Strategy Officer Kris Miller to its board in a move that Brockway calls the addition of an important new voice.

“We’re thrilled to welcome Kris Miller to our board and look forward to the expertise and experience she’ll bring to the table, particularly in eCommerce and marketplaces,” Brockway said, calling the appointment “the perfect addition to our board at exactly the right time.”

That time, of course, comes at the end of an unprecedented and unplanned explosion of the business that saw the re-emergence of demand for such “ancient concepts” as dining room tables and china sets, as well as standards like home offices and home bars, Brockway said. Besides hiring board members and boosting its roster of celebrity designers, Chairish is also pursuing more traditional retail operational adaptations such as new payments functionality. That includes a new relationship with PayPal and testing a PayPal buy now, pay later product.

From a business management standpoint, the year ahead cannot be any more difficult than the year just completed. Brockway is managing and planning for a world in which the extraordinary success and acceleration of the Chairish business model will need to adapt. Just as it has with Wayfair and Amazon, the spike in home furnishing sales online may be tempered with less time spent inside as the pandemic (hopefully) ebbs.

“We get asked all the time, ‘What’s going to happen when everyone can go back to stores?’ and my point of view is that there is always room for brick-and-mortar shopping,” Brockway said. “But once people develop new habits, which has been happening a lot over the past year, and consumers experience the selection and the ease and the discovery and the delight of our brand, that’s something that will stick around in the long term.”

Given the dynamics of its core demographic of affluent 35- to 65-year-old women, Brockway said Chairish should be more protected from an impending back-to-work rebound.

“Because of the nature of our price point and [the fact that] the segment of the market we deal in really has that flexibility, I don’t think [our core customer] is leaving home anytime soon,” she said.