Furnish.NG - The Journey Has Just Begun!

Never before in the history of our country has it been utterly imperative for us to look inwards and create value for ourselves by manufacturing and patronizing locally-made products and services than now. The ideals of the recent #BuyNaijaToGrowTheNaira trend was a major consideration when the idea for Furnish.NG came over 10 months ago. To the glory of God, Furnish.NG launched on 3rd of April, 2016 after 10 months of product development and customer development efforts.

Furnish.NG (https://www.furnish.ng)) offers customers access to an online catalogue of highly-customisable, high quality, and affordable pieces of furniture, homeware, and interior dƩcor items. As a marketplace, it will grant our local craftsmen and vendors in the furnishing, decorations, and gardening industries a platform to reach out and connect with a wider customer base cutting across all states in Nigeria and beyond Nigeria. By assembling a wide variety of high-quality and affordable furniture, homeware, interior decoration and gardening items, we hope to encourage Nigerians to look inwards while shopping for their next pieces of furniture or homeware item thereby helping to preserve our foreign exchange and consequently strengthening the Naira in this Post-Oil Era.

Furnish.NG is a product of the actual needs of Nigerians. As the CEO of Donkan Designs Technologies, Iā€™ve worked with numerous clients (while rendering interior architecture services) who wish they could have an easy way of accessing a large catalogue of interior decoration items for use in their homes, offices, and outdoor spaces. Moving around from one showroom or shop to another is one of drudgery they would love to avoid. Furnish.NG will offer Nigerians and beyond an easily-accessible online catalogue where they can review and order their furniture sets, homeware items, and pieces of interior dĆ©cor items.

Two life-changing moments solidified my resolve to create Furnish.NG. First, I was swindled by a furniture maker who I contracted to build a bed and small-size kitchen cupboard for an agreed amount of money, only for him to show up with the bed only. All efforts to get the kitchen cupboard proved abortive. Secondly, my friend and neighbour also contracted a furniture maker to build a bed and bedside drawer, only for the furniture maker to show up with only bed. Similarly, all efforts to get the bedside drawer proved abortive. I realized that thousands of Nigerians might be facing similar challenges every day.

Furnish.NG will provide the much-needed succour by acting as an intermediary between the often-vulnerable customers and the furniture maker/vendor. The Service Level Agreement signed between Furnish.NG and vendors/manufacturers will ensure that customers get full value for their money the first time, always and timely. Customers will no longer have to face the annoying disappointments from furniture makers or vendors. Furnish.NG will basically do all the dirty works for them and ensure that they are satisfied every time.

In retrospect, I believe, all the skills and knowledge I have acquired in the past 11 years were preparing me for this task. Having studied automotive engineering and practised design engineering as a subsea design engineer in the highly-demanding oil industry where compliance to standards and quality assurance are key, I believe I will bring these dispositions to bear in positioning Furnish.NG as the de-facto standard for high-quality items.

Furnish.NG is a direct result of my practical experiences while working on numerous interior architecture projects in the past 2 years. The product is backed up with passion for excellence, dedication, due diligence, superior customer service, unmatchable customer experience, and the vision of building a better tomorrow for everyone.

Furnish.NG launches with over 1000 fully-configurable products cutting across over 50 product categories from Sofas to Coffee tables to beds to mirrors to kitchen cabinets to outdoor chairs to accents to ottomans to bedside tables, etc. We have a traction goal of achieving over 10,000 products in the next six months.

The furnishing, interior decoration, and gardening industry in Nigeria is currently worth over 70 billion Naira (about 350 million dollars) annually and it keeps growing year-on-year as the real estate sector continues to expand with increasing wealth and growing population. There are existing offline players in the market, however, Furnish.NG does not intend to go into competition with these companies. Rather, we intend to build a product that will serve as their alternative channel for customer fulfilment.

At the core of Furnish.NG is offering customers hyper-easy ways to customize their items through the web interface. Customers will have the ability to choose the colour of their sofas or colour/texture of leather or wood finish of their dining table and chairs or the legs of their armchairs or the size of their beds and mattresses or number of seats of their sofa sets or number of seats of their dining set, etc. There is no ā€œone-size fits allā€ at Furnish.NG. Customers choose at Furnish.NG! Customisation is our keyword as we begin the second phase of product development.

We also acknowledge the diversity of buying power of our customers, hence Furnish.NG works around the clock to ensuring that items are offered at most affordable and competitive prices possible. We believe that everyone deserves to live a good life, hence, should be given the opportunity to get their dream furniture or homeware item.

As a business, Furnish.NG will generate revenue primarily through profit on items owned by the company, commission on sales of items owned by vendors, and secondarily through value-added services to be launched in the nearest future.

I say thank you to everyone who has contributed to bringing this product to light. The Journey has just begun!

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Firstly, well done! This is a very niche market and itā€™s nice to see someone tackling it.

These are big ticket items as its not everyday I will go out to buy a bed. So you should aim at emptying my bank by upselling me a mattress, bedside table, furniture insurance and anything to get me hooked.

Also after spending quite a while on the website, I canā€™t seem to find any item that is truly ā€œcustomisableā€. My idea of customisation is that today I can buy only the left side of the cupboard with the confidence that I can come back tommorrow to buy the right side and a matching mirror. This is the VP that puts IKEA ahead in this space.

Finally, in this era of Just-in-time-manufacturing, I donā€™t want to assume that you have a Kingsized Bed lying about in some warehouse. So you may want to provide a lead time and the cost of sending a capenter to assemble at checkout.

Well done once again and All the bestā€¦

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Well done @Ndianabasi and congrats to your team. Also nice write up as well, as it provides good background on what youā€™re aiming to achieve.

A few questions though; from this launch, are you currently shipping anywhere in Nigeria or focused only on Lagos initially? As you mentioned ā€˜Nigeriaā€™s best and largest online furnitureā€™. And what actually happens when a buyer gets defective goods? Your site says ā€˜money back guaranteeā€™, so does Furnish.NG bear liability and hope to recoup it back from the seller.

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Thank you @Tola. Right now, the customisations are limited to selections of colours, fabric types, textures, number of seats for some select categories. The next release of update will feature deep customisations such as those you mentioned and lots more.

We are applying JIT manufacturing principles (or made-to-order system, in plain English). There will be a manufacturing lead time ranging from 3 - 7 days for most pieces of furniture which are not in stock with our vendors. However, Furnish.NG transcends furniture, we will add other items such as homeware (kitchen utensils, kitchen electrical equipments, etc) and interior decor items which can be delivered within 24 hours. I will update the site with information regarding manufacturing lead time and delivery time.

Thanks for your good wishes.

Thank you @PapaOlabode.

Yes, we provide ā€œmoney-back guarantee!ā€ This is important for the business. Customers need to have absolute confidence in their purchasing decision. Furnish.NG takes quality assurance and quality control very seriously, and we will ensure that our craftsmen produce our items to meet our quality guidelines. In the event of a return, we will bear responsibility for items owned by us while vendors will bear responsibility for items owned by them.

Great stuff man :ok_hand:. The ā€œmoney back guaranteeā€ is a killer hook.

PS: Your exposition is quite long though. Gave up after 3rd paragraph.

All the best.

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LOL! Thank you for find time to read and comment sir @Sherlock. Thank you for the good wishes.

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This is so far my ā€œStart Upā€ of the year. Nice one Sir.

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Iā€™m humbled to read this!! Thank you very much @somtoifezue :smiley:

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This is a big niche - I have some Furniture related keywords article on my first blog with Jumia affiliate link and I can confidently tell youā€¦IT IS STILL A CASH COW!

@Ndianabasi Your market is onlineā€¦BIG TIME

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Hello @Ogechi_Daniel_Ndukwe. Yes, the market is huge and a lot of it still happens offline. Iā€™m hoping that Furnish.NG will take up the lead role in educating the marketing and making them to be aware that they can have access to more options when they use an online store.

Iā€™ve come across several posts and comments about you and clearly you are a guru in affiliate marketing. We will love to explore a business relationship with you in this regard. Thank you.

You are welcome Sir, I am always open to partnership (help SMEs drive keyword traffic to their online store/blog).

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We should talk

Please are you referring to @Ogechi_Daniel_Ndukwe or me? :smiley:

Haha, Iā€™m referring to @Ogechi_Daniel_Ndukwe

@Ndianabasi congratulations on your launch. Well done in clearly explaining the value proposition of your business as well as expounding on your professional background as it directly relates to Furnish.ng.

I had a look at the sofa section and noticed a similar naming convention to Ikea (ABAYOMI leather sectional, for example). Although most names seemed indigenous there were a few I couldnā€™t tell their origin. Are we to assume with confidence that every single item we purchase on Furnish.ng is made in Nigeria? If that assumption is incorrect one suggestion I have is to add some text to each made in Nigeria item showing where itā€™s made (e.g. ā€œLovingly Made in Abaā€. This could strongly reinforce the #BuyNaijaToGrowTheNaira philosophy your business subscribes to.

Also do you guys ship outside of Lagos? How do you handle currency rate conversions with purchases made using foreign mastercards?

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Kudos. More power to you. I think you may want to be friends with @Possicon now, of Showroom.

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I was just about to say the same :smile: @Possicon furnish.ng has entered the fray.

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Thank you @Nosa_O.

  1. Yes, naming of each furniture item with a Nigerian name is a unique concept from Furnish.NG. All names used are indigenous and we try to take names from all tribes in Nigeria, so you might not be familiar with some.
  2. I welcome your suggestion of adding the place of manufacture. I will work on this.
  3. Yes, we will ship to locations outside Lagos. We are working with a network of master craftsmen across major cities in Nigeria.

I sincerely donā€™t have an answer to this right now. I will have to speak with the Paystack team regarding this. Thank you.

Thank you @akindolu. I havenā€™t had the opportunity of meeting @Possicon yet. I do respect him and will cherish our first encounter!