Episode 11: Focusing on the End Consumer in Subscription feat. Kristin Toth Smith, President and COO of Fernish
In this episode of the Subscriptions: Scaled podcast, Nick Fredrick, President of Rebar Technology Solutions, is joined by Kristin Toth Smith, President and COO of Fernish. They discuss the ins and outs of subscription furniture, creating the optimal customer experience, differentiating from competitors, and more.
What is Fernish?
Fernish is a subscription furniture company that allows customers to subscribe to furniture items for as little as two months at a time. Their goal is to recreate the home furniture experience and allow customers to effortlessly change their furniture with their tastes and needs.
While furniture rentals have historically targeted businesses, corporate rentals, and short-term apartments, Fernish uses a D2C business model, servicing individual homeowners or renters. Fernish also has a partnerships team that works with multi-family owners, short-term rental owners, stagers, realtors, and more, though this is not their primary acquisition channel.
Fernish offers customers a huge amount of flexibility in their subscriptions. To get started, subscribers choose their furniture items and select a rental period between 2-12 months. During their subscription period, customers are able to add new items, edit or renew the length of their subscription, and even buy-out furniture items that they wish to keep. In addition, Fernish offers convenient services such as furniture relocation for customers looking to take their furniture with them to their new homes.
Differentiating from Competitors
Fernish is unique from competitors in that it reverse engineers its product from a customer’s perspective. From the start, Fernish has made it a top priority to provide customers with the best possible experience. For Fernish, this meant solving for both the existing gaps in the subscription furniture space, as well as the different needs and use cases that customers might have.
First, Fernish identified a need in the market for subscription furniture options that focused more on comfort and decor rather than utility. Next, they uncovered all the use cases that customers might have in the subscription furniture space, such as swap requests, returns, early cancellations, and more. In understanding these two things, Fernish was able to differentiate themselves from competitors and provide an unparalleled experience to their subscribers.
Balancing Experience with Operations
By prioritizing customer experience and providing subscribers with a high degree of flexibility and control over their subscriptions, Fernish created a number of operational complexities.
For starters, Fernish was not able to find an off-the-shelf software platform that could accommodate their structure of having every subscription look different. Because of this, Fernish had to build out a solution from scratch that would allow them to manage each unique subscription, as well as the changes associated with them throughout the duration of the subscription.
On the back end, Fernish had to build out a warehouse and inventory management software that would allow them to keep track of their assets both inside and outside of the warehouse, including the usable life of products, repairs, and so on.
How COVID-19 Has Impacted the Subscription Furniture Industry
In the initial months following COVID-19, Fernish noticed a 3x jump in demand for office furniture. However, as time went on, the demand moved away from being centered only around office furniture. More people started upgrading basic home staples, such as their couches, kitchen tables, and so on. Decor items such as throw blankets, rugs, and pillows also became more popular.
Kristin explains that at the onset of COVID-19, people were likely focused more on the utilitarian aspect of furniture and looking to quickly create their home offices and work spaces. As people started spending more time in their homes, there was a shift from wanting to make their space more utilitarian, to wanting to upgrade the atmosphere and multipurpose capabilities of their space.
To hear more about subscription furniture and customer experience from Kristin, tune into this episode of the Subscriptions: Scaled podcast.
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