Interiors - The Digital Decorators

A slew of startups offering digitised interior design options has hit the market in the past few years, hoping to bring order, efficiency and predictability to the legacy industry.

- Varsha Meghani

Name me one furniture brand in India,” challenges Pankaj Poddar. Arms folded across his chest, he waits for a response. When an answer is hard to come by—excluding furniture marketplaces like Pepper fry and Urban Ladder—the 40-yearold founder and CEO of Hipcouch, an end-to-end interior decorating services company, smiles knowingly. “That’s because there’s aren’t any [branded players of significance],” he says, “The market is completely fragmented and unorganised.”

The market he refers to is the $20-25 billion—by industry estimates —home improvement market, which includes furniture, décor and renovation services. Some wager that it’s a $30 billion industry. As huge as it is, more than 95 percent of the market is unorganised, serviced by several thousand freelance designers, contractors and labourers.

But therein lies the opportunity. Poddar claims he was the first to spot it back in 2012, along with his cofounder Parikshat Hemrajani. Both engineers by training, they followed conventional career paths in finance and consulting respectively in the US, before returning to India to do “something entrepreneurial”. While hatching plans for a travel start up, it so happened that Hemrajani was doing up his living room. From scouting out a good interior designer to coordinating with the contractors, dealing with opaque prices and erratic timelines, Hemrajani says the experience was a “nightmare”. “We saw the pain points first-hand.”