In a studio apartment in downtown Philadelphia, off Rittenhouse Square, I stood awaiting a product demonstration. Stephen Kuhl, a founder of the start-up Burrow, apologized that he had only a beta version to show me — the actual production model would feature some minor aesthetic tweaks. The other founder, Kabeer Chopra, motioned for me to give it a try. I sat down. It was definitely a couch.
Burrow is on an enviable trajectory right now. The company is a graduate of the prestigious Bay Area tech accelerator Y Combinator; it also has a healthy list of pre-orders for its product’s planned debut in January. But given that pedigree, the product is an unusual one: couches. Not cloud-connected couches or remote-controlled couches — just couches. Technically, the company makes a couch, singular, available in a few different colors and configurations. The one I was sitting on belonged to Jess Goodman, a friend of the founders and an early supporter. Its design was midcentury modern unexceptional, and it was perfectly nice. But the couch is not Burrow’s main attraction. Burrow is selling a couch experience.
When customers order a Burrow couch online, the standard model will ship to their apartments in three or four boxes. A human of average size should be able to take those boxes up the stairs (if they have stairs) and build the couch alone, without tools and within minutes.
Chopra and Kuhl tell me that for urban professionals between 25 and 35, the physical process of buying a sofa and moving it into an apartment is a series of “pain points.” Some of these points are literally painful, like carrying a large sofa up a flight of stairs. But the term is business speak for any kind of friction, however abstract, between a customer and a new couch. Burrow doesn’t claim to have improved upon the couch itself: It’s a pain-management company. (...)
If a company can get to market first and establish itself as the singular way to buy a particular necessity online, it can clean up — even if it’s appealing to a relatively small millennial luxury market. Most of the founders I spoke with mentioned Casper as an inspiration, and it’s easy to see why. The venture-funded company was an overnight success in 2014 selling foam mattresses online and delivering them compressed into manageable boxes. Last year the company was valued at over half a billion dollars. It stands out even among Silicon Valley fairy tales, which makes “Casper for couches” a self-explanatory business pitch.
The best thing about this whole product category is that it might represent a step away from Ikea’s disposability without going all the way back to Grandma’s antique sofa. If consumers are already thinking about moving, portability is at least as big an obstacle to maintaining furniture as mediocre craftsmanship and cheap materials. These companies want to make a couch that will last for 10 or 20 years, even if the buyers have no idea where they’ll be or what they’ll be doing that far down the line. Buying a piece of furniture that you will realistically hold onto longer is a kind of forward-thinking thrift.
But this new approach also hints at something more sinister, more bad-future. Different furniture suggests different ways of being in the world: A heavy table says one thing, and a mattress on the floor beside a folding chair says another. Campaign takes its name from the furnishings that British colonial functionaries would take on assignments, ready to pack up if recalled by the Crown. It’s an apt fit with one version of upwardly mobile millennial living, which involves reducing all “personal” needs to an efficient minimum. It’s a style beloved by Silicon Valley — which finances accessories like the liquid food replacement Soylent — and exemplified by the Google engineer who blogged about the time he spent living in a small truck near the office.
This Silicon Valley lifestyle and the Silicon Valley business model are caught in a chicken-and-egg dialectic. Each holds that whatever work can be automated, eliminated or subcontracted to others should be, thus leaving all our valuable code ninjas and management rock stars free to do more work, pursue expensive enriching experiences and watch Netflix. This is the luxury that some of the valley’s most successful products are offering; there are now niche online services for doing your laundry, chopping your food, driving you around and delivering your toilet paper. The entire app-services economy can serve as a dispersed and techno-mystified mother, a caretaker who dotes on the implied bachelor user.
The various furniture founders — Burrow’s, Greycork’s, Campaign’s, Floyd’s — experienced the same series of pain points when it came to couch ownership. All are city-dwelling men with at least some postgraduate education; four of them are 29, the fifth is 28. It’s not surprising that they should encounter similar hassles or, because most attended business school, think of comparable entrepreneurial solutions. But given that investors and customers have encouraged them, it’s worth asking exactly what kind of pain they plan to remove from our world.
We want our customers to spend their time on things that are meaningful to them,” Brad Sewell, of Campaign, tells me, “not sweating a couch up flights of stairs.” But his company’s target market actually pays for experiences like Tough Mudder, an extreme obstacle course where participants shell out over $100 to race miles through the mud, scale walls slicked with grease and be otherwise abused with their friends. It’s most likely not physical hurt that’s the problem with real-world couch-buying: It’s the forced interaction with others, the loss of control. The most appealing part of buying furniture online is that it saves customers from a series of questions to which there are no answers in advance: What if there’s nothing that looks right? What if you can’t get a cab or can’t find one with a trunk big enough for your purchase? What if you get it home and can’t lift it up the stairs or fit it through the doorway? Unlike many issues in our lives, these things can’t really be looked up ahead of time. There are risks you can’t plan your way out of, and the process is virtually impossible for one person to manage without help, whether paid or cajoled.
Maxwell Ryan, of Apartment Therapy, is not optimistic about the prospects of companies like Burrow. “There’s this Silicon Valley mind-set where they solve a problem and so they think they’re going to make a million dollars,” he says. “But just because it’s a problem for them doesn’t mean it’s a problem for everyone.
Burrow is on an enviable trajectory right now. The company is a graduate of the prestigious Bay Area tech accelerator Y Combinator; it also has a healthy list of pre-orders for its product’s planned debut in January. But given that pedigree, the product is an unusual one: couches. Not cloud-connected couches or remote-controlled couches — just couches. Technically, the company makes a couch, singular, available in a few different colors and configurations. The one I was sitting on belonged to Jess Goodman, a friend of the founders and an early supporter. Its design was midcentury modern unexceptional, and it was perfectly nice. But the couch is not Burrow’s main attraction. Burrow is selling a couch experience.
When customers order a Burrow couch online, the standard model will ship to their apartments in three or four boxes. A human of average size should be able to take those boxes up the stairs (if they have stairs) and build the couch alone, without tools and within minutes.Chopra and Kuhl tell me that for urban professionals between 25 and 35, the physical process of buying a sofa and moving it into an apartment is a series of “pain points.” Some of these points are literally painful, like carrying a large sofa up a flight of stairs. But the term is business speak for any kind of friction, however abstract, between a customer and a new couch. Burrow doesn’t claim to have improved upon the couch itself: It’s a pain-management company. (...)
The best thing about this whole product category is that it might represent a step away from Ikea’s disposability without going all the way back to Grandma’s antique sofa. If consumers are already thinking about moving, portability is at least as big an obstacle to maintaining furniture as mediocre craftsmanship and cheap materials. These companies want to make a couch that will last for 10 or 20 years, even if the buyers have no idea where they’ll be or what they’ll be doing that far down the line. Buying a piece of furniture that you will realistically hold onto longer is a kind of forward-thinking thrift.
But this new approach also hints at something more sinister, more bad-future. Different furniture suggests different ways of being in the world: A heavy table says one thing, and a mattress on the floor beside a folding chair says another. Campaign takes its name from the furnishings that British colonial functionaries would take on assignments, ready to pack up if recalled by the Crown. It’s an apt fit with one version of upwardly mobile millennial living, which involves reducing all “personal” needs to an efficient minimum. It’s a style beloved by Silicon Valley — which finances accessories like the liquid food replacement Soylent — and exemplified by the Google engineer who blogged about the time he spent living in a small truck near the office.
This Silicon Valley lifestyle and the Silicon Valley business model are caught in a chicken-and-egg dialectic. Each holds that whatever work can be automated, eliminated or subcontracted to others should be, thus leaving all our valuable code ninjas and management rock stars free to do more work, pursue expensive enriching experiences and watch Netflix. This is the luxury that some of the valley’s most successful products are offering; there are now niche online services for doing your laundry, chopping your food, driving you around and delivering your toilet paper. The entire app-services economy can serve as a dispersed and techno-mystified mother, a caretaker who dotes on the implied bachelor user.
The various furniture founders — Burrow’s, Greycork’s, Campaign’s, Floyd’s — experienced the same series of pain points when it came to couch ownership. All are city-dwelling men with at least some postgraduate education; four of them are 29, the fifth is 28. It’s not surprising that they should encounter similar hassles or, because most attended business school, think of comparable entrepreneurial solutions. But given that investors and customers have encouraged them, it’s worth asking exactly what kind of pain they plan to remove from our world.
We want our customers to spend their time on things that are meaningful to them,” Brad Sewell, of Campaign, tells me, “not sweating a couch up flights of stairs.” But his company’s target market actually pays for experiences like Tough Mudder, an extreme obstacle course where participants shell out over $100 to race miles through the mud, scale walls slicked with grease and be otherwise abused with their friends. It’s most likely not physical hurt that’s the problem with real-world couch-buying: It’s the forced interaction with others, the loss of control. The most appealing part of buying furniture online is that it saves customers from a series of questions to which there are no answers in advance: What if there’s nothing that looks right? What if you can’t get a cab or can’t find one with a trunk big enough for your purchase? What if you get it home and can’t lift it up the stairs or fit it through the doorway? Unlike many issues in our lives, these things can’t really be looked up ahead of time. There are risks you can’t plan your way out of, and the process is virtually impossible for one person to manage without help, whether paid or cajoled.
Maxwell Ryan, of Apartment Therapy, is not optimistic about the prospects of companies like Burrow. “There’s this Silicon Valley mind-set where they solve a problem and so they think they’re going to make a million dollars,” he says. “But just because it’s a problem for them doesn’t mean it’s a problem for everyone.
by Malcolm Harris, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Craig Cutler for The New York Times
