Launch HN: Pabio (YC S21) – Interior design and furniture rental as a service
After exiting our previous startups, we had some time on our hands and started visiting many friends at their homes for a coffee to talk about anything and everything. One thing stood out: In most cases, their apartment interior was awful — it was almost always crammed with cheap furniture that didn’t match with each other or the apartment. So, we asked our friends why they wouldn’t hire an interior designer and purchase nicer furniture that fits better, and most of them gave us two reasons: first, interior design seems elitist and expensive; and second, buying a full apartment interior is (a) too expensive, and (b) doesn’t make sense if you rent an apartment and don’t know how long you’re going to stay in it.
We figured that if we combine both things—interior design and furniture rental—we can create an affordable package for tenants that’s still very high-quality.
Here’s how it works:
The user uploads a floor plan of their apartment and takes some photos for our reference. Using these, we generate a 3D model of the apartment and one of our interior designers furnishes it. We send the user a fully rendered, photorealistic view of what their apartment will look like [1]. If they like it, they sign up, we deliver and install all furniture, and the user pays a monthly subscription fee. We also fully insure all items and offer optional add-on services like electricians and bi-weekly cleaning. Once they move out, we take all the furniture back, renovate it, and place it in a new apartment at a discounted price.
For the whole process to work smoothly, we developed a semi-automated rendering workflow. We built a web-based drawing tool that allows us to easily draw a floor plan, drag-and-drop furniture items on it, and convert it to structured data [2]. We send this JSON instruction file to a Blender instance where we run a Python script to generate renders using our custom Blender plugins. This process is not fully finalized yet, so we usually have to manually adjust some parameters like the camera placement or applying filters, but give it a few more months (or years... heh), and we’ll be able to end-to-end automate the floor plan-to-render process.
Although a lot of our core tech is internal tooling such as the rendering service [2], Pabio.com serves as the web app where users can plan their furniture deliveries, file insurance claims, manage billing, etc. You can test out Pabio at https://pabio.com, or check out a sample proposal that we send to customers [1].
We’re very excited (and a bit nervous) to hear what you think! Please leave us your feedback and share your ideas about how we can improve our offering.
Thank you so much!
Carlo & Anand
[1] Sample proposal: https://pabio.com/sample-interior-design-concept
[2] 30-second demo of our internal interior design tool that generates renders: https://pabiousercontent.com/marketing-assets/launch-hn/desi...
104 comments
[ 6.4 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadHow the buyout works in general is that all your monthly payments go towards ownership. Say you have a contract for $400 per month for 2 years, and your furniture costs $12,000. At the end of this period, you can either (i) pay the difference, i.e., $2,400, and you own the furniture; (ii) continue the subscription until you've paid the amount back; or (iii) you can sign a new contract and get brand new furniture with no extra cost.
> When you do the move out do you also have shipping for an extra fee?
At this point, we don't, but that's also because we haven't had any move outs yet so we didn't consider the person items. We currently only move all your furniture at no additional charge. We can perhaps add a one-time paid addon service where we also move your personal items to your new apartment. Thanks for the great idea!
It's probably safe for you to assume that most Canadians know where Europe is.
I am less confident in that assumption.
yours, an expat Canadian.
But I am hesitant on the price point. At ~$4,800 / year as with the sample proposal, it might be a tough sell (or "rent", in this case).
The other options are to hire a designer and buy the furniture. High upfront cost but you still own the furniture and can always re-sell it to recoup some costs. Yes, this is a hassle. But how much is the hassle worth?
I can also just do a long-term AirBnb rental that comes fully furnished, many already with great style. Then I don't have to worry about any of this.
If I had a lot more disposable money than I currently have, and I had to get a place for an extended period of time, I'd do this in a heartbeat. So perhaps I am not the target market.
I wish you luck, there is certainly a market out there for something like this.
Thanks for the feedback, I agree that it's not extremely affordable yet, and we're trying hard to get the price down. We currently work with a retail partner but plan on going direct-to-consumer soon, which should make our package more affordable.
Since we currently only serve the Swiss market, it's common for unfurnished apartments in Zurich cost upwards of $2,000, so adding $400 on top of that for a really beautiful interior package is not that big of a jump, especially when compared to fully-furnished apartments which cost significant more.
> The other options are to hire a designer and buy the furniture.
We also offer a buyout option, so all your monthly payments go toward ownership. Our goal is to ensure that you don't end up paying more during the course of your subscription than the retail price of the furniture if you were to purchase it all upfront.
> I wish you luck, there is certainly a market out there for something like this.
> I wish you luck, there is certainly a market out there for something like this.
Thanks so much! We're looking forward to more feedback!
I'd be mindful of that assumption across markets. I'm in London and while furnishing may have an impact on the list price for some properties, list price is almost always a product of the market and it's rarely possible to quantify the _cost of furnishing_. For example, apartments in my building are roughly the same price whether furnished or unfurnished. Furnishing is seen as a convenience here[1], not a financial benefit.
I do think this is a great proposition and that, once prices come down, you'll have a good opportunity in London -- just challenging the assumption that furnishing is universally reflected in price :)
[1] Typically, a furnished property is easier to tenant, so landlords can choose between furnishing (easier to find a tenant, risk of expensive damage) or unfurnished (harder to find a tenant, no risk of damage). Very common to see a furnished property offered "furnished or unfurnished" if someone wants to bring their own furniture, and that doesn't impact the price.
I would question that statement. :) That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense economically. The only two reasons that come to mind why this may be true are a) the furniture in the furnished apartments is super cheap or b) the furnished apartments are located subpar in one way or another. But I may be wrong.
I don't want to expose my address but you can browse "London" on the UK property website Rightmove and find comparable apartments (same building, same floorplan) with furnished/unfurnished prices that are no different.
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/110025968
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/110204747
I'd say that's the lower end, actually. Zürich is indeed pretty pricey.
The benefits of living in a nicely arranged and furnished home can not be overstated. I work from home and my productivity ... and income ... and my peace of mind ... went up dramatically.
Same! Even though we're based in and only service Switzerland for now, I live in Groningen, the Netherlands (we're a fully remote team), and I got a fully furnished apartment. A comparable unfurnished apartment is ~€800 and I pay €1400, but damn -- it's just so much nicer! And that combined with having a cleaning service [1] so you don't have to think about much at all, it's almost like living in a hotel!
[1] Pabio optionally offers a bi-weekly cleaning service (2.5 hours every other week for ~$100/m) through a partnership.
I might not be the target customer in this case. But I'm not sure how a professionally designed interior is a good option for saving money. I'm cheap, so my first choice is looking for quality used furniture off of places like craigslist. I've gotten some pieces I'm happy with.
But the issue with furnishing an empty apartment that way is that it takes longer to find pieces, especially if you want it to match. My assumption is prices would be more than retail at a minimum. I'm also not usually comfortable with in-store financing offers. They usually aren't a good deal. But your terms could be good, debt seems to be cheap right now.
This does definitely sound like something I would be interested in though if my place was empty and I was happy with pricing.
If you have to manually hire and pay a professional interior design, it's not very affordable, I agree. At Pabio, we have several in-house designers from eastern Europe so it costs us (and therefore, you) a very small (bundled) amount. This is also because they don't need to spend too much time on each apartment (each designer does multiple apartments per day) as they are aided by our technology, for example our drag-and-drop floor plan design tool and automated rendering engine.
> My assumption is prices would be more than retail at a minimum
You'd think so, but this is excitingly not the case. You never pay more than retail. This is possible because we get a discount from our retail partners much larger than customers would get because of our volume. Also, furniture has huge margins, so we're planning on going direct-to-consumer later this year, which means even more savings for the customer. Either way, our offering is more affordable than buying all your furniture upfront from a retailer, especially when you think of the bundled services, e.g., fully insured furniture (don't be afraid of dropping coffee!), free delivery and installation, and optional paid addons like electricians and cleaning services.
> You’ll work mostly with cool people (Not all of us are cool, but the majority are.)
Seriously wondering who the uncool people would be and what it would be like to work with them
> Research into styles in various regions (ie beach rentals vs ranch style vs mission/craftsman).
For sure! We plan on adding several more styles in the future. The only thing that slows us down is creating the right furniture set and reliably sourcing items that will remain available to us. I love the beach-style idea!
The lead time is the problem (along with the pricing in CHF). I want this today and not 10 weeks from now (more than half of the period of the rental).
Cool idea. I am concretely interested but not at that lead time.
If anyone has American recommendations I’d be thrilled. I’ll probably use inhabitr otherwise.
We're currently only available in Switzerland, so the pricing is in CHF. I hope we're un Austin soon though, you're the second person who told us that they'd be interesting in using us there!
> I want this today and not 10 weeks from now.
I very much agree, this is something we're working hard on. Furniture is not a great asset class since warehouse costs very quickly outweigh revenue (large and bulky!), so everyone in the supply chain is incentivized to reduce inventory risk as much as possible, which basically means everything is ordered on demand. This is the reason why you usually have to wait 12 weeks for a sofa when you order it online.
We try and do it quicker, at around 4 weeks (sometimes even earlier, in case of super-urgent apartments, we've even furnished them within one-to-two weeks), but we're exploring ideas to make this faster.
Joining Can: lovely to see a Bern-based firm at YC and on HN!
Finally, we get access to a cool startup offering FIRST before Americans/everyone else!
Or at least work with an interior designer to get a sense for what I'd like.
People usually drop out of the funnel when we request a floor plan. This has been the main reason we're unable to convert some customers. For now, if you upload a few photos from different angles and the dimensions, we can probably work with that too, but we need more data before we're sure!
I really like the idea of having a company take away all of my furniture when moving out, and if even one third of it didn't get trashed that would be a win.
Finally, a lot of people only buy new furniture because they are afraid of pests hitching a ride. At some point you will need to address that from a quality assurance and liability perspective.
This is closer to Feather (YC S17) which is ecommerce + rental furniture. For us, the interior design aspect is a large part of our offering because you don't have to imagine what your apartment will look like with all of these items. Plus, we can offer better prices and spend more on acquisition since we have a large ticket (an apartment or at least a room worth of furniture rather than renting a single chair).
> Finally, a lot of people only buy new furniture because they are afraid of pests hitching a ride
You're right, this is food for thought. We already fully insure all items in the customer's apartment, so day-to-day wear-and-tear and some pest control can be fixed for free. But yes, we'll definitely need to think about this more when we refurbish furniture and put it in another apartment.
I always thought something like Pabio for used mattresses would be great, so people could easily try lots of mattresses and find one which really helps them sleep.
To do that you'd need a nontoxic process for ensuring the mattress is free of bedbugs (e.g. put it in an airtight bag, then fill the bag with an oxygen-free mix of nitrogen+CO2 for long enough that any bugs will suffocate)
That being said, I agree that the Scandinavian style (warm, wooden, etc., what you refer to as "WeWork") is overrepresented in our photos, so we'll definitely work on changing that.
> All your monthly payments go towards ownership. Say you have a contract for $400 per month for 2 years, and your furniture costs $12,000. At the end of this period, you can either (i) pay the difference, i.e., $2,400, and you own the furniture; (ii) continue the subscription until you've paid the amount back; or (iii) you can sign a new contract and get brand new furniture with no extra cost.
I think that at the end of the day, students are probably not your target audience, because they also see furniture as more disposable. So they would sell their furniture too, when they get a new room. Now you could use that opportunity to offer a very cheap rental fee specifically for students and then they could give back the furniture when they move on.
I guess my point is, the price point is okay, the fact that it would take two years to eventually own it isn't attractive to a student. The alternative of paying for some time (e.g. 6 months) and then dropping the subscription without owning anything at the end is also unattractive.
I agree that unless we offer significant savings, students are not an ideal market for us, but maybe when we get furniture back and we renovate it, students might be especially interesting since we can furnish their rooms for a big discount.
Would be much more compelling, at least for me.
[0] https://pabio.com/pricing/
One question about the economics. You are going to get a lot of cases where people stop subscribing after the furnishing, and then decide they don't really want it / don't think it's worth it (think good faith - not abuse).
Would you be able to handle that without too much of a dent in your costs? Would you offer refunds / cancellation, and then own the costs to take the furniture back etc?
Thanks so much! Excited to serve you!
> Would you be able to handle that without too much of a dent in your costs?
Since we fully insure the furniture and depreciate it over a longer time, our goal is to refurbish and reuse most items after your subscription is completed. If you cancel sooner, chances are that the furniture is in an even better quality so we can probably use more of it. So it shouldn't be too bad if people start to cancel early, but of course, we wouldn't want too many people to do this.
> Would you offer refunds / cancellation, and then own the costs to take the furniture back etc?
Yes, we allow for monthly cancellation. We're still trying to figure out exactly how this would work because the prices are lower for longer contracts and we're not fully sure how much of a "penalty" we will charge for early cancellation. For now, we've decided that people will only have to pay an administrative fee of $1k-$3k depending on how soon they cancel it, and then we'll take all the furniture back, refurbish it, and put it in a new apartment.
A while back I came across Feather, which seems to be a startup trying to do the same thing:
https://www.livefeather.com/
They were part of the YC S17 batch. Even the styles of the websites are quite similar. What differentiates your services from Feather apart from geographic location?
> ...Feather (YC S17) which is ecommerce + rental furniture. For us, the interior design aspect is a large part of our offering because you don't have to imagine what your apartment will look like with all of these items. Plus, we can offer better prices and spend more on acquisition since we have a large ticket (an apartment or at least a room worth of furniture rather than renting a single chair).
Also note that there are several competitors from the other-side that provide whole furnished apartments for rent such as Blueground. You seem to be in between the “rent single pieces of furniture” and “rent a whole apartment” spaces and need to ensure that the space is carved out enough and the market is there.
Congrats for being accepted into YC! You now have a large journey ahead of you!
1. Traditional retailers like IKEA and Wayfair: We don't think they'll be fully pivoting to a rentals because it's a very different business model and requires lots of financing/credit setup. These retailers are motivated to get rid of their inventory as soon as possible (warehouse space!) whereas we look at furniture as assets, so we're happy to take yours back, refurbish it, and put in in a new place.
2. Furniture rental startups like Feather and Fernish already have a rental system in place, but but personalized interior design is a different game altogether, especially when you consider our proprietary rending technology which generates photorealistic renders with relatively little human effort. We think our technology will set us apart.
3. Online interior design services like Modsy and Havenly only focus on human-driven interior design. They might want to upsell you a furniture package, but they don't have the necessary rental and logistics setup to have a full offering as we do. This is only competition for us if people want interior designers but want to buy all furniture outright (say for $20k) and our goal is a more affordable offering.
4. Depending on where you live, fully-furnished or serviced apartments are (much) more expensive than renting an apartment, so we think our value proposition is also the "rent to own" part where each of your monthly payments go towards ownership. We also have optional addon services like electricians and biweekly cleaning, so I think we'll more directly compete with the serviced apartments space, except that it's still your apartment and you can own the furniture if you like.
Thanks for your feedback and making me think about this!
PS: Mihir is also our first engineering intern at Pabio! :D
[1] https://pabio.com/country-waitlist/
[2] https://pabio.com/careers/
Excerpts from https://pabio.com/pricing/:
> Pabio is for both tenants and home owners
> After your subscription period ends...you can pay the difference and purchase your furniture
How is this different (functionally, or financially) from financing that is pretty standard fare at most furniture shops?
1. We offer personalized interior design. Yes, it's theoretically possible that we interior design your apartment and then outright sell the furniture package to you using a financing setup like Affirm, but:
2. The customer doesn't necessarily want to own the furniture. For example, at the end of their subscription, they can return all furniture and get a new brand new style and continue the subscription, or if they move sooner; we take care of all delivery, installation, moving, etc., and:
3. We offer add-on services like electricians and biweekly cleaning. I personally really believe in the "living as a service" part where the goal is to have a subscription that takes care of all aspects your living. Furniture is only the first step, there's lots more we can do there!
[1] https://giansegato.com/essays/how-i-beat-the-berlin-rental-m...
Basically, you are selling the furniture on credit the very same day they leave your warehouse.