Finding a place to live is great, but figuring out how to furnish it can be even more complicated, not to mention expensive. Sisters Emily Motayed and Lee Mayer, who grew up in Potomac, Md., know what that's like, and decided to create their own company, Havenly, to help solve that problem for others. The startup offers an online platform for interior design services, with a straightforward interface and a flat, $185 fee per room for professional design help and access to deals that lower the usual cost of trying to furnish a room.
It started two years ago when Motayed had just found a new apartment to move into in New York City while the recently wed Mayer and her husband had just bought a home of their own. Both sisters wanted to decorate their new homes, but didn't want to spend enough to attract the interest of a professional designer and the most expensive furnishings. While commiserating over their shared issue, the two women realized that the fact they were dealing with this kind of frustration meant there were plenty of others looking for a solution too.
"That search eventually became our business," Motayed said. "It's the convenience factor that's the big selling point."
Convenience and cost pretty accurately describe what the e-commerce world is about and whether it's to order food or buy a car, the platform that's easiest to use with lowest prices is one that will attract a big customer base. A simple survey online leads you to a discussion with a designer who works with you to come up with custom setups for your chosen room or rooms based on your style and budget.
Once you're happy with what you've designed, you get a list of all the products and their prices to with what you will. You can buy them through Havenly, which partners with some stores for special deals and can coordinate it all for you, or you can buy it piecemeal as your interest and budget allows. You can also just get them yourself if you want, there's no requirement when getting design help to order what you pick out. But of course, the very convenience of it is likely to encourage more than a few clients into just signing off on whatever final form their room design has taken.
"Millennials are used to convenience - we grew up with technology and aren't necessarily used to the time intensive process that interior design traditionally is," Mayer said. "A service like ours is well tailored to the busy, urban, millennial. We are also a fraction of the cost of a traditional interior designer, so we are able to provide those with a lower budget the ability to have a beautiful home as well."
Though the company is technically based in Denver, D.C. is very much the kind of market that Havenly is designed for according to the sisters. The D.C. area is a place where convenience is a feature everybody is looking for, and there's a continuing interest in design, aided in part by the endless feature articles on the fancier mansions and estates in the area.
"It doesn't hurt that the suburbs of DC, where we grew up, is home to beautiful houses, which helped fuel our love for interior design," Mayer said.
Investors paying attention to all of the other "convenience industry" startups know how much of an advantage there is at getting in early on the right ones. Havenly closed a seed round from MergeLane in February and is starting the process of looking for more. At the same time, the company benefits from having an automatically clear revenue stream that makes it mostly independent from the need for venture capital.
"We don't really need to raise right now," Motayed said, though she added it could happen as they start to expand. "Right now we're lean and scrappy."
