Home Canvas intends to lure you with best decor

Spruce up your space with Home Canvas

When Sandeep and Radhika did their home, they faced the challenge of finding the perfect décor. They would browse endlessly and walk out of hundreds of stores for the exact furniture and accessories they had in mind. This led Sandeep to set up Home Canvas, an online discovery platform for the best in furniture and décor.

Sandeep Sridhar (39) has worked with Titan and Tanishq as part of the brand marketing and business teams. In an elaborate chat with Baishali Mukherjee, he speaks in detail about his entrepreneurial initiative:

The ideation

As we may have all experienced, this is easier said than done. Finding furniture, furnishings or décor that are ‘just right’ is quite a challenge. As a result, more often than not, prospective shoppers walk out of home stores. Or they browse endlessly and have to ‘settle’ for something they do not love.

Add to that, the hassle of locating stores both online and offline. And then having to mix and match accessories, furniture and furnishing from across stores. Most often, it turns out to be a tiresome experience and shoppers end up with something they regret.

Home Canvas, is a solution to all these woes. It is an online discovery platform for the best in furniture and décor.

The offerings

The Home Canvas experts curate stores, suppliers and artisans from all over the country. They bring together furniture, furnishings and accessories that range across styles, materials and price - to deliver the world of decor to your living room.

We search the length and breadth of the country and curate the most exquisite products. You will have fun discovering perfect pieces. Whether it’s a rug from a store in Jaipur or upholstered chairs from a Delhi label, you help you do up your home.

Need to address personal problem led to entrepreneurship

I started Home Canvas about two years ago, after about 15 years in the corporate world. My trigger and inspiration for starting up was my own personal challenges in terms of decorating our new home. Despite all the digital revolution, I found that it was still difficult to find furniture and décor products that met your budget, style and location preference.

As I dug deeper into the problem, I realized more and more people struggle with the same issues. This led me to start Home Canvas which simplifies the search and discovery process. We enable access to hundreds of unique vendors and thousands of products.

The curation process at Home Canvas

The most important role as a curator is to understand the Home Canvas users and their needs. The team uses this deep understanding to assemble and present information in a simple and structured way. The second role of the curator is to be a subject expert. To be able to curate content in any field, your subject expertise is unparalleled. Combine these two skills and your users will keep coming back for more.

Having an innate understanding of our audience, what they are looking for and their wants – is an integral part of our curation process. This happens via constant engagement with our audience – on the website and on social media channels. (We grew our Instagram page to 30,000 users in less than two years.)

The next step is to identify the most creative and unique furniture and décor vendors in the country. Additionally, our expertise helps us to quickly identify the latest trends and products.

Further, using a combination of personal curation and the right technology, we identify and showcase the most interesting and relevant products present in the market.

The growth chart

We are an online business and to that extent, most of our growth has come from our digital marketing initiatives. Most of our users come from social media where we have a strong following. The media has also been helping us off late which has helped us gain more recognition.

We have just launched a very powerful product discovery platform. This allows users find the most unique and creative furniture and décor products in India. We are seeing great engagement and feedback for this platform. We will continue to add new features and make this platform more and more powerful.

The company has been bootstrapped till date. We started as a pure content platform. We have now evolved into a powerful product discovery platform for everything to do with furniture and home décor. The technology platform is only getting more powerful by the day. It is helping more and more users in finding what they need.

I was  awarded the Outstanding Titanian of the Year in 2008 for extraordinary contributions.

Being a part of the NASSCOM 10000 startups program, we operate from the NASSCOM warehouse in Bangalore.  Ours is a lean team, with most resources being outsourced.

Future plans

We are continuing to add many engaging features to help users choose the products that they want more easily. For these categories, sometimes it’s very challenging to be able to collaboratively shop and make the whole process of shopping online fun and engaging.

Have you ever engaged with a home décor specialist for doing up your apartment? Do share your views.