Buying furniture online is a hard habit to cultivate even among people who buy things online. Problems: high ticket size and few repeat users. Urban Ladder and its competitor Pepperfry are the two most well-capitalised startups in this space, trying to change habits of consumers and getting them to buy furniture online and buy more often.

What has Urban Ladder been up to, in the last year?

The company is in the middle of a transformation. The back-to-back funds it raised till 2015, led them to invest in a multitude of areas like marketing, warehousing and increasing its product catalogue. But it began to pull back on some of these areas as it was not yielding the kind of results it hoped to see. As a result, it stopped its 14-month long marketing campaigns in March 2016 and cut its product catalogue size by half to 2,000. Financial year 2016’s results will reflect some of these excesses. 

Results:

Rs 34.4 crore: Revenue the furniture seller made from operations. It is up from Rs 12.9 crore in financial year 2015. But Pepperfry’s revenues are 2.8 times more than what Urban Ladder made in 2016.

Rs 104.5 crore: The advertising and marketing expense of the company. It is over two times more than what it spent in 2015. And Pepperfry spent lesser.

Rs 16.4 crore: That’s what it costs the company for delivering its products across 19 cities. In comparison, Pepperfry spent Rs 14.5 crore to deliver in 500 cities. You can do the math on who gets more bang for the buck.

Rs 181.3 crore: The losses of Urban Ladder. While the company made lesser revenues than its competitor, it ended up making more losses than Pepperfry.

Rs 58 crore: The salaries Urban Ladder employees earn. This is 2.4 times more than what Pepperfry pays its employees.

Rs 75 lakh: Salaries the two founders paid themselves. In 2015, they took home Rs 40 lakh each.

• financial results
• PepperFry
• Urban Ladder