Revamping Indian Homes and Lifestyles with HeavenandHome.com
HeavenandHome.com is a niche e-commerce portal and magazine that aims to bring the highest quality of home and lifestyle products to Indian consumers within an exclusive environment. Funded by one of Europe's biggest VC funds, it sells branded home decor and lifestyle products like bed linen, cushions, accessories, furnishings, spa products, and so on. It wishes to provide a platform for Indian as well as international brands to showcase their variety and style to the Indian homeowner. A holistic, end-to-end home and lifestyle experience, HeavenandHome endeavors to revolutionize Indian homes and lifestyles.HeavenandHome.com runs on the flash sales model, where curated branded products go on sale for a whole week, at up to 70% off. At any given point they have about 14 sales running and they make a small percentage of every sale, while still selling products at massive discounts on MRP. They do so by liaising directly with manufacturers for bulk purchases and avoiding expensive overheads like retail space.
Having launched the site on the 19th of December 2011, the Heaven & Home office is in New Delhi. It has been co-founded by Tushar Ahluwalia and Sunnyraj Agarwal from the London Business School; Nishrit Shrivastva, an IT engineer from the University of Illinois who has worked with Dell and Pearson and Tara Kaushal, the former Launch Editor of BBC GoodHomes who is based in Mumbai. Apart from the four co-founders, they are expecting to grow to around 150 people by the end of April.
Heaven & Home's inspirational magazine sets the tone for the shopping experience, where a range of personally selected products from internationally acclaimed brands are available through an exclusive shopping club at great discounts. “With the online magazine, it’s a breeze to browse through innovative ideas to make living a luxurious experience every day. Never before has buying artful and classy home products been made so comfortable and reliable!” says Tara.
Their sales are all tie-ups with known and upcoming brands and have ongoing relationships with names like Sarita Handa, SAS Homes, Ochre, etc. As far as offline tie-ups go, they are the online partner for the Indian Architecture and Design Show in November. In addition, they do a lot of consumer-facing events at stores such as Cocoon Fine Rugs in Mumbai in mid-April.
"Even though women are later adopters of technology, we were sure they're our target audience. And our audience profiles have told us that we're clearly on the right path," Tara says. Their typical customers are women of SEC A, urban and educated, between 25 and 40 years old, though they have had penetration into tier two cities as well.
Of course, this all came with its own set of challenges, especially with logistics. “We're all coping by sleeping rarely and working 24x7 and drinking lots of coffee! But, as they say, it's always better to have more work than none at all, and we're grateful to be facing challenges of great worth!” Tara concludes.
Online home decor store, Zansaar, has also been in news recently, having secured investment from Accel Partners and Tiger Global.
For more information please check https://www.heavenandhome.com/
