Suzy Davidkhanian (00:00):

On May 14th in New York City, EMARKETER's Ad Buyer Strategy Summit brings senior media buyers and advertising strategists together for a full day of data-driven insights, fresh forecasts, and frank conversations about what's actually working and what's next. Check out the full agenda and grab your ticket now, link in the show notes. Hi, everyone. Today is Wednesday, May 13th. Welcome to EMARKETER's weekly retail show, Reimagining Retail. This is the show where we talk about how retail collides with every part of our lives and I'm your host, Suzy Davidkhanian. On today's episode, we're breaking down one of the most frustrating shopping journeys in retail. The home category. It's massive, it's growing, and yet it still feels harder than it should. Because here the challenge isn't just the discovery piece, it's also the decision-making. Joining me today for his first re-imagining retail episode is principal analyst, Yory Wurmser, joining me in our new studio.

(01:00):

Hi, Yory.

Yory Wurmser (01:02):

Hey, Suzy. I'm so honored to be on this.

Suzy Davidkhanian (01:04):

I'm so happy to have you and special guest, Dan Bennett, CMO of furniture.com. Hey, Dan.

Daniel Bennett (01:11):

Hi, team. Thanks for having me.

Suzy Davidkhanian (01:13):

Well, thanks for joining us. So before we get started, I thought we could do a very quick speed intro for you, Dan. In 30 seconds or less, tell us what you do in one sentence.

Daniel Bennett (01:28):

Wow. What a great challenge for a verbose Englishman to try and get something done in 30 seconds or less. In 30 seconds or less, four years ago, three of us launched furniture.com and I spend every day and every week trying to build this business along with my partners to be the default furniture shopping destination.

Suzy Davidkhanian (01:48):

I love that. The default. We need it. I'm going to talk a lot about how I find this is a hard ... I love shopping, but this one's a hard one for me, so I'm very excited. I love your site. Okay. My other question is, what is your favorite? Now you could pick one, current book, podcast, TV, show, movie.

Daniel Bennett (02:07):

Oh. I can't pick one. I'm going to give you a few. So we have lunch with our team most days out here on our big table in furniture.com, New York. And I spend most of the time talking to them about stuff I'm into right now. And I'll give you two tips. My favorite podcast, I think the best podcast in the world outside of this one-

Suzy Davidkhanian (02:31):

Well played.

Daniel Bennett (02:34):

The rest is history, which is a British podcast all about history hosted by two British history professors. I know that doesn't sound like the most compelling thing to listen to, but I promise you it's fascinating. And my favorite book of the last 12 months has been The Will of the Many series of which I've read two. There's a third one coming out soon, which is kind of sci-fi stuff. They're my two favorite things right now.

Suzy Davidkhanian (03:00):

Wow. Yory, do you know these?

Yory Wurmser (03:02):

No, I don't. I haven't.

Suzy Davidkhanian (03:04):

I do know the British show, Have Yo Been Served? Do you know this one? Classic. I am Canadian after all.

Daniel Bennett (03:12):

That's a throwback. Oh

Suzy Davidkhanian (03:14):

My

Daniel Bennett (03:14):

God.

Suzy Davidkhanian (03:14):

A

Daniel Bennett (03:14):

Throwback. I love it.

Suzy Davidkhanian (03:16):

Yeah. I could talk about this all day, but we got to start talking about furniture. So we know it's one of the biggest categories in retail and we're talking about hundreds of billion dollars a year and more and more of that shopping is starting to happen online, but for many shoppers, it's still surprisingly complicated. Nearly every shopper, and I got this from you guys too, says that they feel overwhelmed by the number of options. Most feel stressed about making the right choice, whatever that is for them. And the average purchase can take up to weeks sometimes with dozens of tabs open to just land on one item that they want to buy. So today we're just using the home category as a lens to understand where the shopping journey actually breaks down and what it really takes to help customers move from browsing to deciding.

(04:02):

But before we dive in, I always start with another rapid fire question, which is what is the last home item you bought or you thought you wanted to buy but haven't pulled the trigger? Yory, starting with you.

Yory Wurmser (04:15):

It's so unsexy. I bought a shoe rack. That was the last home item I bought. Our old one was falling apart. It was a mess.

Suzy Davidkhanian (04:24):

Did you replace what you had or you bought something new, completely different?

Yory Wurmser (04:28):

We bought something completely different, bigger and better.

Suzy Davidkhanian (04:32):

Did you use any tools or are you just magically new?

Yory Wurmser (04:36):

I used a tool called my daughter to put it together, but she found it, she bought it using my credit card and she put it together.

Suzy Davidkhanian (04:46):

I love it. You sound very satisfied. Yeah,

Yory Wurmser (04:48):

Very

Suzy Davidkhanian (04:48):

Satisfied

Yory Wurmser (04:49):

Customer.

Suzy Davidkhanian (04:49):

Yeah. Dan, what about you?

Daniel Bennett (04:53):

I think the humble shoe rack doesn't get the love it deserves. Our house would be a mess without appropriate shoe racks. So I like Yory's response there. Mine was probably my office chair, which I have to tell you, I made a bad decision on it. It's not comfortable. You know what I did? Suzy, I went cheap and I think on an office chair, you just got to grin and bear it and buy a decent one. So that was what it was. It was an office chair.

Suzy Davidkhanian (05:27):

I see some buyer's remorse there.

Daniel Bennett (05:29):

Yeah, definitely. It might be finding its way to Facebook.

Suzy Davidkhanian (05:34):

It's funny because I bought something from my kitchen, which I thought I measured the cupboards properly, but evidently I did not. And now because the return policy was very complicated, it is just sitting in my living room waiting for someone to take it, but it's too little of an item to put on marketplace. That just seems like too much effort. So if anybody needs a kitchen shelf organizer that is a litle bit wider than most New York apartments, definitely let me know.

Daniel Bennett (05:58):

Well, I mean, if it fits shoes on it, you could have let me know and maybe there could have been a problem solved there.

Suzy Davidkhanian (06:04):

Oh yeah, I should repurpose it.

Yory Wurmser (06:05):

Just four weeks too late for me.

Suzy Davidkhanian (06:07):

Sorry, I wish I'd known. I should have complained about this instead of my table that I still haven't purchased. Okay. So Dan, at a high level, what is furniture.com exactly and what problem are you trying to solve?

Daniel Bennett (06:20):

I mean, it depends on the day, honestly, in terms of the last answer. The problem we're trying to solve I think legitimately is that there is a trust issue in the furniture category. And you said it beautifully in your introduction at the top of the show that furniture is a giant category and growing, but it's a category I think that historically has been slow to adopt to the rate of change from a technology point of view and it's because trust is typically quite low in this category. And what I mean by that is when you're purchasing perhaps anything other than a shoe rack, but if you're purchasing a sofa or a dining table, as we've discussed, you really need to trust the place you're buying it from. And when we first stood up this business, we did a lot of consumer research and understood that it was one of the categories that had some of the lowest trust scores in it.

(07:14):

So what we're trying to do at furniture.com is build what we call the decision layer for furniture.

(07:23):

Our feeling was and still is if we could bring together a multitude of furniture retailers that people already know and trust and we could put them in one place with one simple checkout, one cart checkout, then we would start to move up that trust curve. There are plenty of large furniture retailers, I should say online furniture retailers out there. There's one big one in particular, but much of that product is dropshipped. It typically doesn't come from known brands. And we felt like if we could, like I said, bring those brands together in one place with one cart, we could start to solve those problems. There are many other answers that compound on that as it relates to the technology we're using to do that, but perhaps we'll come to that later in the chat.

Suzy Davidkhanian (08:13):

It's interesting because you're using the word trust. And I mean, we've been talking a lot about trust in an era of AI especially, but it's also confidence. It's such a big purchase and you kind of almost feel like you're stuck with it if you make the wrong decision except for if it's something that you can repurpose on marketplace.

Daniel Bennett (08:36):

Yeah, that's totally right. I mean, funnily enough, we did a keynote a couple, as we know, because we saw you there at Etail and our Keynote was really around the premise of confidence and the ability for a digital experience to imbue confidence. Our angle on that was that we have built an AI that will happily small talk with you around what you need to solve for, but confidence is key for sure.

Suzy Davidkhanian (09:03):

And within the realm of what you guys are doing, it's like you're helping me get to the decision faster

Daniel Bennett (09:09):

With

Suzy Davidkhanian (09:10):

More confidence without necessarily pushing a specific brand or retailer. It's much more about, like you said, folks are not always brand ... It's more brand agnostic, I'd say, the home

Daniel Bennett (09:19):

Store. That's right. It is. Funnily enough, within furniture, there are some brands that stand out here. If I'm going to go and buy maybe a shoe rack, but if I'm going to go and buy something that I need quickly, I don't want to spend a ton of money on it. There are brands like Ikea that have that big, powerful, beautiful brand and they do an amazing job of that. But much of the time people actually don't shop by brand. They shop by attribute. They need a certain size sofa and a certain fabric and that's typically how they'll search. The brand piece will underpin a purchase. If you see a ... Bloomingdale's one of our partners, I'm probably more likely to trust a Bloomingdale's checkout than I might be Brand X that's being dropshipped from somewhere overseas I don't know about. So getting back to your confidence point, I think that all lends itself to that.

(10:11):

You also hit on something, which is doing my job for me here, but the shopping journey is extremely convoluted in furniture as well. And the average hour is something like nine hours and 13 tabs used just to find a solution to a furniture problem. And we felt like in this day and age that was absolutely ridiculous. There are multiple ways of solving that and we're actively building against trying to truncate that experience.

Suzy Davidkhanian (10:43):

Well, also, I mean, we have touched on all these points, but it is a very complex category in that there's many big, big ticket items, lots of decorative items, lots of things in between, but people don't shop it very often either. So that adds to that level of complexity. And I know not every listener comes to us from a category that is this complex, but there are certainly some key learnings like how do you remove friction? And you guys have done that very easily.

Daniel Bennett (11:12):

Yeah. I mean, I'm glad to see ... I like that you think it feels easy. The backend of it's relatively difficult. It's an extremely complicated category for a few reasons. It probably carries with it friction points that exist in other categories, but we're lucky enough to have them all existing in one. So it's expensive in many cases. It's usually, for many people, it's the third most expensive thing they'll buy behind a house and a car, larger furniture, that is. It's very emotional, it's very visual, it's very personal. It's a low frequency purchase, as you mentioned, so people don't have the muscle memory necessarily. They're not typically experts. And again, that's where that decision layer becomes so important. It's why we've built from the very beginning of the development of our tool, we utilize machine learning. You go back four years to synthesize all of our feeds, our retailer feeds, so that by time they end up on furniture.com, they all look equally beautiful.

(12:22):

They're all presented in the same way. So we built a tool to help us do that behind the scenes. And then we were able to, on top of that, build what we call Doty. Doty is our AI helper, if you will, sort of Furniture Sherpa. But utilizing Doty, a furniture shopper can seed some of that expertise to furniture.com and we will help them make those decisions. So you probably know this from some of your past shows, but a Google search was typically three or four words. An AI prompt is often north of 23 or 24 words. What that means for us is that somebody can come in simply prompt. I in as long form as they want and we will synthesize that information and present back what we think are the right solutions for that particular furniture challenge. Now, you might need to prompt her a couple other times as it relates to getting color or texture or whatever, but we felt like that was a shortcut to making people feel confident in their decisions.

Suzy Davidkhanian (13:26):

Well, especially when we think about the endless aisle, I know Yory, we talk a lot about this. Sometimes too much choice isn't helpful either and that comes across in a lot of different categories as well. What is that defining balance between choice that is optimal so people feel like it matches their style or their emotional connection versus so much choice like my dining room table situation where I just haven't made a purchase yet?

Yory Wurmser (13:55):

Yeah. I mean, I'm really curious to hear what Dan says about this because he's actually seeing he has a lot of empirical data that shows what's working, what isn't. But in general, the higher the consideration, the more people want to shop, the more they're willing to go through a lot of choices. Now that doesn't mean they want choices that are broad and not related to what they're looking for. So that's what makes something like Dottie really useful. You get a lot of choice, but it's already within a realm where they all could be possibilities. Now, if it's low consideration, then I think you're less willing to go through a ton of stuff. You're more looking for what works and what's the best price. But I think that what a lot of people forget about high consideration versus low consideration. With high consideration, people actually like shopping a lot.

(14:49):

They don't mind going through a lot of things, whereas with low consideration, they just want to get-

Suzy Davidkhanian (14:53):

Get it done.

Yory Wurmser (14:54):

Get it done. Yep.

Daniel Bennett (14:55):

Yeah. I would echo that. I think that one of the things we talk about furniture.com is, and I personally think shopping for furniture should have a bit of joy in it. You're shopping for something that is expensive and meaningful and it's going to be with you for a long time and it should have a litle bit of joy mixed in and that's been largely scrubbed from the experience and we're looking for ways to add that back in. The other thing I think that's important even within a high consideration category like shopping is at a certain point people get a sense of what they like. I've done my research, I've watched the YouTube videos and I've followed these influencers. I think I know what I like. And then pretty quickly they start to ask questions around, is it going to fit? Is it worth the money?

(15:46):

Is there a better version somewhere else? Again, can I trust the retailer? Am I making a mistake? I've got to live with this mistake, Suzy, as you said earlier. So what we're very aware of and how we think about structure in our UX and our design, our product design is going back to inspiring confidence and reducing overwhelm. If we can do those two things and if Dottie can help you do that, rather than saying, "Here are 10,000 sofas that match saying, here are eight to 10 that we think fit what you're looking for, " I think that's a better experience.

Suzy Davidkhanian (16:23):

Right. There is this tension because if I want a blue couch and you're not showing me a blue couch, then I'm going to walk away. But if you're showing me, like you were saying, you're at every other color couch as well, then it's overwhelming and it's very fragmented and it's hard to make a decision so you walk away and then hopefully you come back. What I think is cool about your site is that not only are you curating so that I don't have to deal with this tension, but you're also looking at couches across many different brands so that I can pick something from Bloomingdale's that matches something from whoever else, Macy's and it's fine versus my going to all the different websites to put a room together

Daniel Bennett (17:05):

That's right. The latter point you make there is the biggest pain in the bum. We've all been there. You have eight tabs open because one sofa fits from here and you think one table fits from there and then you've got to navigate the individual checkouts. Yeah, we wanted to put it together, let you compare and contrast and build a cart and get on with your day kind of.

Suzy Davidkhanian (17:27):

So with all of that, are you seeing numbers that are also showing that you're minimizing returns for the retailers?

Daniel Bennett (17:34):

Yeah, we do. I think what we've seen from the early instances, so we launched this version of the website back in at the end of February. So we built the first version of furniture.com. Well, furniture.com has had multiple lives before we stood this new business up on it. Our version of it was originally a more aggregator-like experience. It was still underpinned by a lot of the tools we used today, but it was fundamentally aggregating traffic for our retailers. We have since pivoted that. We learned pretty quickly that shoppers actually want to check out in one place as well. So we added the checkout piece so you can now check out with furniture.com. And that launched in February and we have seen dramatic reduction in returns. There is a return process you probably are not surprised to hear and usually people will get a piece, they'll spend a little bit of time with it, decide whether it's right or wrong.

(18:32):

So that can be a cycle, but we're long enough into the new site now that we've seen that we have had some accretive impact on lower returns.

Suzy Davidkhanian (18:43):

That's great. So you're making the life of the retailer and the consumer easier.

Daniel Bennett (18:47):

I hope so. Yeah.

Suzy Davidkhanian (18:48):

Speaking of making easier, I mean, there's a lot of innovation happening right now on an AR/VR sort of lens and it's the shiny penny that's still shiny right now, I would say. When it comes to visual search, conversational AI, there's a lot happening. Does this help the journey you guys or is it just over-hyped?

Yory Wurmser (19:09):

I definitely think it helps the journey. The first company that I thought had a pretty good AR experience was IKEA about a decade ago, more than a decade ago. And what they found back then, and that was an incredibly early version was that it helped increase consumer confidence in an online purchase and also decrease returns. And since then, you've had all types of these AR tools in brands, in Snap, in Google Ads, and they've all shown the same thing, higher conversion rates and lower returns. Dan, I know you guys have something along those lines. How has it worked for you?

Daniel Bennett (19:55):

It's funny because what I thought would be the case has sort of ended up being the inverse a little. The IKEA reference is a really great one because that is now a decade or so old, which is wild. What we felt coming into this was that we would build these room building tools and AR and VR back when Meta was in the process of crushing its stock value by moving into the metaverse. And I think what we've seen with the fairly dramatic evolution of AI as it sort of marches towards general AI is that the ability to talk semantically, especially with furniture, as Yory mentioned earlier, people don't mind spending the time to do the work here, but people don't talk like furniture salespeople. They talk like human beings and they're not going to talk about a 92-inch performance fabric with kiln-dried wood. They're going to talk about, I need a durable sofa for a small apartment with a dog.

(21:05):

And so we deliberately built tools that would allow people to think about that natural language interface, which I think is the first barrier so that they don't feel uncomfortable because they might not know some of the right language around furniture. And I think that's proven to be way more valuable than the visual piece, at least at this point. We do have a new tool, a new product coming online at the end of next week, which is visual search that's not necessarily that new, but I think it's important. People don't often know how to describe what they're looking for, but they saw a picture of it or they took a picture of it. That's an easy way to do it. I think it all boils down to what can we deliver that removes friction? What can we deliver that helps them feel like their judgment is valuable and then what can we deliver that makes them feel confident again.

Suzy Davidkhanian (21:56):

Yeah. It's the removing any friction to head off the buyer's remorse.

Daniel Bennett (22:02):

And there's a lot of friction in furniture, Suzy.

Suzy Davidkhanian (22:04):

Yeah. I also think I bought my kitchen thing, which was under $50, so I don't feel super invested in it. While I was home from a website that does have an AR/VR tool, but I probably should have, walk over to my kitchen and zap the thing to make sure it was going to fit, which I didn't do. So it brings me to this idea around mobile. We talk about mobile all the time and bridging the gap between online and physical. It plays a huge role in the shopping journey, but not every category leans into it. How should retailers really be thinking about mobile in these high consideration sets that are low frequency as well?

Yory Wurmser (22:44):

Generally, the higher the frequency a purchase and the more people want to research, especially visually, it shifts. It skews a little bit more towards PC than mobile. You see that in travel, you see it in auto. I'd imagine you see it in furniture as well, but that doesn't mean that mobile is still not the center of a lot of what they're doing. It can be these conversational tools that could work while you're thinking about it, go back and forth in that way. It could be the visual search, it could be the tryon in the room. Those things work obviously only on mobile, but when you're talking about skewing in one way or another, these categories do skew a little bit towards PC from mobile.

Suzy Davidkhanian (23:39):

I think probably for me, furniture and home decor in general, it's probably mobile when it comes to being inspired. Do you see something on Instagram? Maybe you screenshot it and then you upload it to the website to see, or I didn't think about, but I will when I go home, take a picture of my couch to see if it'll give me something matching from a dining room table and try this new angle and see if that'll help. So mobile has a place, but probably not for the actual conversion part.

Daniel Bennett (24:07):

So what we're seeing from our point of view is about 80% of our traffic is actually mobile. And that's not to say that 80% of our checkouts are mobile. Those two things are different. What I think we're experiencing is that mobile is an assist. It's very usable very widely for research. It's a second screen experience in some cases. It might be used to upload imagery. It might be used to ... It's more easy to dictate to as it relates to interacting with something like a Doty. I think there's also still natural movement back to desktop to see a larger image perhaps of something or to feel perhaps more in control of that moment when you're going to click buy. But I do think one of the things we're seeing from our audience, for the furniture category, furniture category is quite broad as it relates to audience age, obviously we see a slightly younger audience starting to become part of our ecosystem and I think that's driving a lot of the mobile experience for us.

(25:25):

We don't have an app for example yet. So we probably will have an app by the end of the year for furniture.com.

(25:32):

We haven't seen that there hasn't been a native need for it yet. You can save your favorites, you can share with friends, family, roommates, et cetera, from a general mobile experience. So we haven't done that yet, but I do think it will change. I think over time we're going to see more and more people feeling comfortable clicking buy on a mobile screen.

Yory Wurmser (25:52):

Yeah. And I mean, one of the things we've seen also is just that generational divide that people are willing to do the whole consumer journey on mobile if they're Gen Z or millennial. And as millennials are becoming kind of the core of furniture buying, I could see that really shifting the way people behave.

Suzy Davidkhanian (26:10):

Also, a very good distinction that we often forget to make out loud is that there's a difference between a mobile experience and an app and not everybody needs to have an app if there's no core reason for existing.

Daniel Bennett (26:21):

I firmly agree with that. I think increasingly that's the case.

Suzy Davidkhanian (26:25):

Okay. So lots of discussion. For those listening that are outside of the home category, what's one lesson, just one from each of you that folks should take back to their office to make their customer journey a little bit better? Yory, I'm going to start with you.

Yory Wurmser (26:43):

Listen to what the customers are saying and deliver the products, the options that respect what they're looking for. And that I think really involves conversational search. I think that's a key to getting exactly what they want.

Daniel Bennett (26:57):

Yeah. I mean, that's a great answer. The truth for us has been building a standardized dataset such that we can then build really intuitive tools and AI products on top of it like our, as Yory mentioned, our semantic search tool. Without mature solid data, that just becomes a real pickle really quickly. But when you've got it in ... We have three million SKUs on the site, so if we hadn't found a way to standardize that. And what I mean by that, just for your audience sake real quick, is that the way Bloomingdale's One Kings Lane and Serena and Lilly or Lulu and Georgia might talk about modern is different. We had to find a way to standardize all those things. So when you look for modern, when you look for a certain fabric, a certain color, et cetera, it's all the same. And then on top of that, we can build the tools that make finding it that much easier.

(27:56):

So I think do the technical piece first, get the heavy lifting out the way, and then you can create some magic on top of that.

Suzy Davidkhanian (28:02):

We could definitely keep going on this, but unfortunately, that's all the time we have for today. Thank you, Dan. Yeah,

Daniel Bennett (28:07):

It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Suzy Davidkhanian (28:09):

And thank you, Yory.

Yory Wurmser (28:10):

Thanks, Suzy. Glad to be here.

Suzy Davidkhanian (28:12):

And thanks to our listeners and to our team that edits the podcast, please leave a rating or review and remember to subscribe. I'll see you for more Reimagining Retail Next Wednesday and on Friday, join Marcus for another episode of Behind the Numbers. Kaiser, are you so excited? We are. Good. Thank you for that.