Over the last 2 years I have been slowly and patiently researching different stuff on house interiors ( including modular kitchens , based on the assumption that I might spend greater time cooking in a well designed kitchen :D) because we were planning to buy an apartment. A lot of that research did pay off and I would have to thank Houzz.com mostly for increasing my knowledge and time spent on the tablet :).
Apart from gushing over the wonderful high- resolution photos and helpful guides, I also realized that for some reason, the website and company has managed to create a wonderful community of users ,besides acting as a design guide, place for inspiration and advice and (very recently) go to place for shopping products in the US and Canada. I am yet to figure out if there is some
behavioral design that has been used, but for some reason my gut says that the high resolution ( and obviously beautiful) photographs meticulously categorized, labeled and attributed to, along with the calming green theme does help in a lot of ways. I do think there is a bit of clutter and using Laws of Subtraction might help quite a bit, but the slight feature overload won’t deter the huge and loyal user base.
While Houzz did help to make me aware of some basics and what kind of interiors I may be drawn to, I also realized that I would need some amount of expert help to get the look and feel that I was gunning from. Using the “Find a Pro” section to find interior designers, contractors based out of my city in India was not very helpful a year back either. Of course now things have changed and you can find countless professionals listed and some of them have thankfully taken the effort to upload pictures of their projects.
Till the time that there was some content on India, I started doing some research. I realized that for most people around me, word of mouth reviews helped in choosing the interior designer. In fact most of the time, I would come across people, friends and colleagues who had used carpenters and managed to decorate their flats very well. This model works wonderfully in the big apartment complexes that have turned up in the metropolitan cities of India. It is easy to choose a carpenter by just asking the apartment security or asking your neighbours around. The head carpenter has a team under him, is usually experienced and can suggest decent to good designs. He expands his team based on demand and manages to get work done in multiple flats based on a cross-recommendation system. Of course, in most of the cases the flat owners also go through a lot of heart burn, anxiety because the carpenters never deliver on time and some times don’t match up to expectations or create issues with service and compensation. In fact, if a carpenter and his team was excellent for a single owner, chances are that he wouldn’t be able to provide the same service or product quality to another simply because he might take up more assignments than he can scale up to.
Unfortunately the recourse of using an interior designer, contractor and other
professionals might end up exactly the same way if their teams are full of part-time contractors. Most of this industry is unorganized and hence at some level, you end up depending more than you would like to. Very obviously, I was trying to look at reduce the dependence to a great extent. One simple way would have been to use the option of going with our builder’s choices for part of the furniture and the modular kitchen. They had chosen good brands and I liked some of them. But with a mixture of budget issues and timing, I decided to tackle things on my own. In hindsight, I could have gone with the builder options but of course there is some amount of excitement ( and sense of ownership) in getting involved in your house design.
During all of this, I also managed to come across some new startups which had started selling furniture online and seemed like a Godsend. Soon I started looking up UrbanLadder, FabFurnish, Pepperfry and few others with gusto. A recent visit to the retail store of FabFurnish cooled down a lot of the enthusiasm when I realized that some of the furniture looked and felt a lot of different in real life. But honestly, you can at least save time and buy a lot of other useful materials that you would have had otherwise spent in driving , searching for the exact shops and buying.
Obviously, during this entire period I was also furiously hunting for interior designers I could hire and came across countless names. If it was within my budget then rest assured I didn’t like their projects. And if I did, usually their budgets would be way off what we had mind. Thankfully or not, filtering the list of designer was easy because I found very few designers that I liked. And the reasons are pretty simple.
- Industry being unorganized there is no basic database or site that you can search such professionals
- Interior decor magazines like Elle Decor, Design Source etc spend pages
and beautiful spreads on celebrity designers who are out of our reach
I believe I am just part of a greater population with similar needs and pain areas. However the current solutions might end up forcing me to use traditional modes of word of mouth recommendation ( which may or may not be available online) to choose experts who can help me design my dream home.
Long story short, there is a lot of opportunities in this industry and connected domains which is obviously being lapped up by new firms and VCs. While there are lot of firms which bank heavily on the products or a mixture of product and service, there are still very few in this space, which are tech oriented like a Housing.com or say an Indian version of Magic Plan ( from Sensopia). Also, in the interiors space, final quality of delivery in terms of both product, services and experience will count heavily in determining growth and future services. Unless the companies take this into account and deliver, they will fall below in the recommendation chain.
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