What is Furnishly?

by Bryon Finke
February 26, 2012

Furnishly is a large leap forward in the ability to convert valuable, but unwanted, furniture to cash.  The market’s current options for such a transaction are limited to the following:  1) hold a personal sale (e.g. garage/yard or flee market stand) , 2) take your item to a thrift or consignment re-sale shop, 3) list the item on the abstract web.  Each option varies in scale of cost, reliability, and effort required, but all fail to knock the full-spectrum out of the park.  Let’s break down the options a little further.

1) Garage/yard sale:  If you live in the suburbs, or are a member of an active community organization, this may be an option for you, but chances are you live in an urban setting and you simply do not have the time.  These sales require significant time commitment with no guarantee of a sale.

2) Thrift store or consignment retail:  There are several stores throughout the city that offer consignment retail services.  For those of you that are not familiar, consignment is a process in which the retail agrees to hold and market a supplier’s inventory, but does not pay for it until a final sale is completed.  These options can be a good choice, but come with a steep commission rate of around 50%.  Thrift shops will often pay you up front, but will need to hedge their risk by offering a price significantly below market.

3) Abstract Web listings:  The current, and even up-and-coming, offerings on the web continue to provide a generic platform to list items for sale (e.g Craigslist, Oodle, Zarrly etc.).  Take Craigslist, for example; the Craigslist interface and the functional specifics are largely the same, regardless of the vertical.  This is something that definitely has not gone un-reported, but the approach taken to solve this problem is what we believe is really important.

Enter Furnishly.  Furnishly hopes to be the web 2.0 of furniture listings.  By dedicating itself exclusively to the second-hand furniture vertical, the user experience and incremental software builds will be allowed to evolve to meet the specific functional requirements of a furniture transaction.  Second-hand furniture transactions are very unique, which has until now been widely overlooked.  Furniture items are too large to economically ship across country or to another state; Their customer base is essentially limited to the local community.  Furniture tends to hold value rather well, with a relatively slow (or non-existant) depreciation rate.  

Furniture repurposing occurs at such a low rate because the market for such transactions has always been rather inefficient (requires too much time/effort/expense).  We at Furnishly believe the time is now to break through the inefficiently of the ever important marketplace and make repurposing furniture for your home or office something everyone can enjoy.

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