Launch HN: Feather (YC S17), painless furniture rental for people who move a lot
I've moved 5 times in 6 years living in New York, and each time I spent an overwhelming amount of time at IKEA buying, schlepping, and assembling furniture I didn't exactly want. And at the end of each lease, I found myself with furniture that didn't travel well to my new apartment, and often had to scrap it, only to return to IKEA again to furnish my new apartment.
It was a cycle of buying things I didn't really want, that didn't really last - and I'm sure many of you have gone through the same trouble.
That gave me the idea for Feather. Click a few buttons and your furniture is delivered, fully assembled, and placed in the room of your choice. And importantly, when you're ready to move, tap a button and we'll come and pick it up.
We're excited to help people live more free and flexible lifestyles - and would love the feedback of the HN community!
Thanks all,
Jay, Founder & CEO
136 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 257 ms ] threadEDIT: https://rentfeather.com/
This might be a helpful service for real estate agents who need to stage a home for a photographer.
EDIT: looks like there are delivery and pickup fees, actually. I'd like to see those included in the price for rental periods of, say, X months or more where ideally X would 6 but 12 is probably fine.
Fire sales are easier said than done. Takes time to get real replies via craigslist, and often times you might forget to sell the item till days before you're moving, adding to the headache.
No matter how you look at it, the renting option will be more expensive. Just own it and don't try to defend it or make it sound less than it is using shaky comparisons. Doing so just makes you sound shadier than necessary.
However, the pricing is insanely expensive. 3 month rental for a dresser is $210; same for a AC unit. You can buy new ones for the same price.
I agree that furniture rental is a slightly weird value prop though. People lease cars because most folks don't want to outlay $35-100k for a depreciating asset, or they want to change models so frequently that buying becomes unwieldy. Furniture is not nearly as expensive, however, and the rent-to-buy ratios are far less favorable.
Next, the type of people that move often are younger and poorer, and the extra schlepping and assembling are not as big of a problem to them.
True, then again, established furniture rental firms [0] target them; what's Feather's distinct advantage here?
[0] e.g., https://www.cort.com/student
(In case anyone is wondering, we're careful to moderate HN less when YC or YC startups are involved, but "less" doesn't mean "not at all", and in cases like this one the moderation principles are quite well-established.)
The cheaper couches hover around $40/month, which over a 12 month period at 7% YOY interest is valued at 473 PV or 508 FV.
What's the motivation against just buying new or used and selling once you're done? A marketplace for this sort of thing would make more sense than a service.
The hassle of selling used furniture should not be taken lightly, both in it's complexity and its sale price. Items on Craigslist, sold 12 months after purchase, go for 15-20% of retail value.
The problem with every rental place I've seen is how expensive they are. You could just buy the furniture outright for the cost of three months rental. Doesn't exactly match the year lease does it? :-/
There is a used market for IKEA furniture, and they're swapped regularly on Craigslist for half price assembled. Sometimes you can even rent for "free" by buying used and selling later. New items can be sold at half price as well. So I haven't had as much difficulty with that, though I wish they had more "modular" i.e. snap together furniture.
So there are some challenges to this endeavor, good luck.
The breakeven price for our customers is always longer than the total price of the rental. Wonder if we should be explicitly stating this on our site?
https://rentfeather.com/collections/bedroom/products/dunham-...
https://www.wayfair.com/Zipcode%E2%84%A2-Design-Colby-Uphols...
Feather 3 month rental price: $207
Wayfair purchase price (including shipping): $201
I think the larger point (I'm now realizing) is that rental shops focus on monthly prices when it often doesn't make sense. Usually only already-furnished apartments can be had for a month or three. Unfurnished usually requires a full year lease, with only a fraction available for six months, say in downtown or a university town.
So, I might try lower monthly prices for a 6 and 12 month commitments. I think that would get me "over the hump" as a potential customer.
If someone's going to be living somewhere for only 2 or 3 months, I can understand renting. But I don't think renting makes economic sense for most people. You can probably just buy the equivalent or very similar furniture and break even. If you don't wanna assemble it, pay someone on through TaskRabbit or equivalent.
It's a wasteful practice, and an important part of our mission is to keep furniture out of the landfills. That starts by getting as many uses out of the furniture that we can, before it stops working for us, either visually or functionally.
My last move, moving a house almost completely furnished with IKEA furniture, most of which had been around for a decade, only one item (that was inconveniently sized to remove intact, not because of structural failure) didn't make the move.
> We get it. This is kind of new, right? We’re excited about that.
But it's... not remotely new, right?
[EDIT] seriously, "tiny houses" = mobile homes for well-off millennials, Feather = Rent-a-Center for well-off millennials, Soylent = Ensure for well-off millennials. I guess I should start a payday loans company marketed in such a way that using it doesn't offend the class sensibilities and self-image of well-off millennials and say I'm doing something "new".
Edit: Beaten by your edit.
https://furniture.cort.com/storefront/
Just browsing through here suggest they offer more flexible renting periods, (starting at 1 month vs Feather's 3 month requirement), and a website ui and design that looks fairly modern and easy to navigate.
Cort seems to have higher prices for similar goods (only looked at sofa's), but competing against a much larger corporation on price seems to be a bit of a bad business strategy. In the long run I would guess that if feather seemed like a threat, Cort would simply undercut their pricing in the competing market. I don't see what feather has to offer other than the YC branding and a younger target market.
1) Price: compare our prices and, across the board, you'll find we beat them in every category, for every rental length. True, it's not a long-term strategy of ours. But the reason neither you or I are renting our furniture from CORT today is that their prices are above what we'd be willing to pay for a 12 months lease. 2) Style: the overwhelming majority of their furniture is bland, and as one of our customers put it, "my parent's furniture". Our style is strictly mid-century modern and slightly modern, and designed to appeal to a younger demo.
Cort's main business is going after government and corporate relocation budgets. We are focused more heavily on the larger market, servicing consumers who are moving frequently (i.e. every year or so).
This might be the crux though; gov and corp relos are not cost sensitive, as they're coming out of a large org's budget. Individual consumers (your target market) are. An average relo package given to someone is ~$20k.
I'm definitely going to follow your org to see if the experiment is a success; best of luck!
We consider Feather "kind of new" because renting furniture it's not a habit that most people are used to. In fact, 97% of the US owns and deals with their furniture. So we think of ourselves as new in that sense :)
RAC is focussed on rent to own rather than (planned) term-and-return rentals. (Which is why they don't advertise convenient pickup, though they do advertise most of the other feature Feather highlights.)
There are plenty of existing traditional furniture rental firms, though, that do target rentals with expected returns and do highlight easy pickup as a selling point.
We're totally going to disrupt the online news business!
Edit: I should mention I love the idea of renting and returning furniture. I very much identify with the pain points mentioned and would prefer to rent high-quality furniture instead of buying and disposing of particle board crap every year or two.
Actually, the idea of online furniture rental is not bad really, we are just having fun with it. I recently sold my house and I rented furniture for staging, that could be another aspect of their business model, those staging people charge a ton, I get it some of it is for the "design" but really there could be a few canned designed on a web page and done far cheaper I think.
If you've ever had to borrow vehicles/friends or go up flights of stairs, spend an evening assembling, or wade through buyers in classified ads to get rid of it, you know that has value as well.
Wondering how y'all think we should be communicating this to our customers? Thanks!
Aren't delivery and pickup charged services on top of the rental fee? So, it's not a value-add, just an available service (as is the case with incumbent rental providers, and also with most furniture sellers, except haul-away, which is only occasionally offered and even then only in a form useful if you aren't moving, since the haul away and delivery need to be at the same place.)
Other furniture can harbor bedbugs of course, as well as other pests such as cockroaches. It's a risk. I'm not sure how it's dealt with.
That's approximately how much IKEA charges for delivering an order though they only charge based on distance. It doesn't matter if you have a single tea light candle or furnishing an entire 25-bedroom castle.
Delivery costs aside, I'm wondering who would pay the steep premiums for these items. Take this bed for example: https://rentfeather.com/collections/bedroom/products/remy-up...
It's listed as $28/month assuming you commit to a 12-month term. That's $336 in total.
What appears to be the same bed is listed on Wayfair to buy for $338: https://www.wayfair.com/Langley-Street%E2%84%A2-Rasmussen-Up...
The annual cost is the same with the difference being at the end of the year you own the bed rather than being on the hook for an eventual "return fee".
So who would willingly enter such a deal? Is the market targeting people who don't have the credit to buy the items out right?
Or is the moving in/out aspect the real kicker? Sure it's a pain in the ass but that's a steep price to pay to avoid one phone call to a moving company (or even just a CraigsList "Free bed ... just pick it up" posting).
EDIT: Here's an even better example. I'm pretty sure these are exactly the same bed as the pictures are identical:
Purchase Queen for $200 w/ free shipping: https://www.wayfair.com/Zipcode%E2%84%A2-Design-Colby-Uphols...
Rent from Queen for $28/month = $336 + $99 shipping: https://rentfeather.com/collections/bedroom/products/dunham-...
At a certain point it makes sense to pay for convenience. It may not be for everyone (honestly it's not for me), but that doesn't mean there's no market.
The price of several of the items on Feather is close or sometimes more then the retail price from Overstock/Wayfair and delivery is not included. What am I missing here and what value do they provide?
Feather might as well just drop ship the furniture to your door and send somebody to assemble it.
Edit: Looks like Wayfair even offers 2 day shipping on some items and usually provides an exact delivery day: https://www.wayfair.com/Zipcode%E2%84%A2-Design-Colby-Uphols...
This is anecdotal but a lot of my Furniture is from Overstock/Wayfair and arrives within a week living in a city. Ikea also delivers for a flat fee within a day or two.
- The $338 bed that you linked to is on a massive, one-time sale right now. I've refreshed the page several times and the price keeps changing. The manufacturer must be testing a bunch of things out - take a look. Let's leave that one example there for now.
- The Purchase Queen you linked to does look nearly identical to what we get from our manufacturer that must also sell to Wayfair. And the price on this item has shifted dramatically on Wayfair as well.
Seems you grabbed a particular item that doesn't favor us well in the rent vs buy equation. For the majority of our items: try the same comparison and let me know what you find.
Point here is, we should be more aware of the dynamically shifting prices of items on other sellers websites and re-price our items accordingly. Good catch, thanks.
Is there a reason you decided to enter this more conventional, established market?
Since it's rental, not purchase, changing ownership (or change in corporate focus) after the furniture is delivered is a risk to the customer. A VC-funded startup with visions of growth is going to have a different customer service focus than someone trying to milk the last drops out of a dying business, and the former can turn into the latter quickly.
Re established market: interestingly, Cort and most other rental cos don't have a very good hold on the direct to consumer rental market. They are primarily focused on B2B rentals. Their brands and experiences are under the weather and don't appeal to our target market of younger people who move a lot. There's a new breed of successful companies cropping up that simply refresh the experience and tailor it to the way people live and interact today.
I don't think I would use this service if I was moving to NYC, I'd just look for a furnished apartment.
We're also partnering with property managers and real estate cos in NYC to help them furnish their units. It seems to be resonating well with them to not have to pay thousands of dollars up front for furniture, and instead can make monthly once their rent checks come in. Helps them with cashflow.
It seems awfully silly that all summer long, one young person is moving an ikea dresser out of an apartment while another person is moving an ikea dresser into the same apartment.
Obviously there's a "tragedy of the commons" issue when you rent instead of buy, but it seems like there should be a better way to do this. You'd think people hate moving enough to be ok with less selection of furniture, potentially slightly more scratched up stuff, or buying a mattress pad to get over the weirdness of a previously used mattress.
I always get horrible flashbacks to my own experiences seeing another "fresh off the boat" foreign engineer trying to outfit his entire life in one trip to the East Palo Alto Ikea, using up an entire roll of receipt paper to cover the hundreds of items they had to buy for their new unfurnished home.
How is it? Everyone says it's a dream
Fast internet, cheap food and nice markets.
Is English only, no Thai really a limiting factor in surviving?
English is not a problem at all. You can get by with English at many (if not most) restaurants, shops, apartments, lawyers, accountants, hospitals, dentists, etc. etc.
On one, the base commander's wife outfitted all the housing with her style of furniture. She was sure she was doing everyone a favor. Naturally, everyone else's wife hated it.
Providing furnished apartments is likely a no-win situation, which is likely why they are hard to find.
Some AF bases had a better system where there was a warehouse with a variety of furniture, and the residents would pick what they wanted. Of course, higher ranking officers got first pick :-)
https://www.lendup.com/
> Good Credit Not Required.
> Instant decision.
Wow.
I used to work for LendUp. They're the most caring and altruistic people I've ever met. I mean that literally.
LendUp uses machine learning & data science to decision people with more granularity than a credit score, and can therefore approve much deeper than banks or credit card companies ever would. On top of that, as LendUp learns you're a reliable borrower, it will lower your interest rate as far as it can for you, give you more favorable terms, and even extend a credit card for those that qualify.
LendUp helps people improve their credit when almost no one else will lend to them, and has been shown in independent studies to both improve credit scores and decrease the costs of borrowing for subprime borrowers. These are folks for whom the only other option is payday loans or pawn shops if there's a shortfall, and LendUp uses tech to give them much better options.
It's a noble mission, and one I'm damn proud to have been a part of.
Stopped reading right there.
The landing page mentions "for people trying to build up credit history"
There was some startup that micro-loaned in poorer countries based on a person's cell phone info (ie, how many contacts, who they called the most, etc, etc).
Well intentioned loan sharks are still loan sharks. LendUp is attempting to solve a manufactured problem.
People don't need payday loans, they need social issues fixed that trap them in a cycle of poverty. No VC money available for that though.
Real problems need solving.
Here's some lower hanging fruit, and more directly measurable too: https://www.givedirectly.org
Real problems need solving, indeed.
If you're in the Tampa area, I hope I can count on your vote! If not, no worries. I'm prepared for the long game.
High fees go hand in hand with the high risk they are taking of not being paid back. Everyone has to chip-in or the model doesn't work.
How do you know?
Thanks for the mod work! It's a thankless job but appreciated.
Thanks for the nice words, doubly nice after getting penalized.