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 offers customers access to an online catalogue of highly-customisable, high quality, and affordable pieces of furniture, homeware, and interior décor 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, I’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. Funish.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 décor 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 where preparing me for this task. Having studied automotive engineering and practiced design engineering as a subsea design engineer in the highly-demanding oil industry were 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 “one-size fits all” 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!
