From Startup to Big Player: How Fernish Leveraged to Scale in a Large, Saturated Industry| EP. #93

The furniture industry is not only saturated but extremely competitive. Nina Klein, Vice President of Product Management at Fernish, is no stranger to these limitations with her decades of experience in the startup world and the digital customer experience.

On this 93rd episode of The E-Comm Show, Nina will share how Fernish, a rental and subscription-based furniture company, has leveraged a unique pocket in the furniture industry to scale from a startup to a big player. Tune in as Andrew and Nina discuss startup culture, marketing to different audiences, logistics, and more!

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From Startup to Big Player: How Fernish Leveraged to Scale in a Large, Saturated Industry

SPEAKER

Andrew Maff and Nina Klein

CONNECT WITH OUR HOST: AndrewMaff.com  |  Twitter: @AndrewMaff | LinkedIn: @AndrewMaff 

Nina Klein

Nina Klein is VP of Product at Fernish, the premium direct-to-consumer furniture and décor rental service on a mission to make it effortless to create your home. In her role, Nina oversees all aspects of the site strategy and user experience, including the most recent implementation of an AI-driven virtual design tool and an AR application that allows customers to experience what furniture will look like in their own homes.

Prior to Fernish, Nina worked for a wide range of early to mid-staged startups across e-commerce, marketplaces, and other tech and tech-enabled companies and was an expert-in-residence for Grid 110, an LA-based non-profit accelerator built to support diverse founders and their startups.

Nina started her career at Bain & Company where she worked on projects across a variety of industries including tech, consumer products, biotech, and media/entertainment.

Originally from Texas (and back there now after a long stint on the West Coast), Nina has (fun fact) a black belt in tae kwon do and a feisty 5-year-old (with another on the way). She enjoys finding creative ways to trick her family into eating more vegetables and online shopping (which she pitches to her husband as pertinent work-related research).

Transcript: 

00:03

What we really sell from a service is flexibility and convenience.

00:06

Hey Everyone, this is Nezaar Akeel of Max Pro, Hi I'm Linda and I'm Paul, and we're Love and Pebbles.

00:14

Hi, this is Lopa Van Der Merch from RASA 

00:16

and you're listening to and you're listening and you are listening to The E-Comm Show

00:27

Welcome to The E-Comm Show, presented by BlueTuskr, the number one place to hear the inside scoop from other e-commerce experts, where they share their secrets on how they scaled their businesses and are now living the dream. Now, here's your host, Andrew Maff. Hello,

00:47

everyone. Welcome to another episode of The E-Comm Show. I'm your host, Andrew Maff. And today I am joined by the amazing Nina Klein, who is the VP of Product Manager management over at Fernish. Nina, how are you doing? Ready for a good show?

00:59

I'm so excited to be here. Yes.

01:02

So you told me this is your first podcast, I'm so excited about this, which is crazy, because it's interesting, because Fernish is not a small brand. And being the VP of Product Management, I would think that you would be front and center all the time. So I'm gonna make sure that this is the beginning of many, many podcasts for you to do over the course of your career. Thank you. Awesome, so I'm sure gonna be fine. Let's start it off with I'd love to hear a little bit more about yourself your background and obviously more about Fernish and we'll kind of take it from there. Cool.

01:36

Sounds good. So yeah, so my name is Nina Klein, I've been at Fernish for about three years and I currently head up product management, so kind of everything website, you know, internal tools related, I kind of fell into the role of product or fell into product management about 10 years ago in startups. So I've worked with a lot of them in commerce marketplaces, across industries, you know, fashion home those kinds of things. And before that, I was actually a business consultant for like a super large company. So I've had the stretch the gamut, I guess of experiences. Also love just startups in general. I worked with a nonprofit accelerator in Los Angeles for a while as well. And love is kind of like just the mentorship, of new baby startups. It's been great.

02:24

Beautiful, what is Fernish? What's the I know it's a product and a service. There's like, what's the background of the company? What's the focus on right now?

02:33

Yeah, so So Fernish is a rent rental services furniture and decor company. So we rent to own and allow people to purchase furniture outright, there it's a subscription model, and we serve seven different large metropolitan areas. So we kind of have everything in-house warehouses, technology, everything kind of in-house. And it's been a very fun journey with them as well.

03:00

Is it all your own branded furniture? Or is it other people's brands as well?

03:06

Yeah, it's a combination actually. So when we started you know, the company is about five years old. And so I started about three years ago and at that point, we had large brands, recognizable brands, Crate and Barrel CBT we still carry a lot of that as sort of white labeled, and then we also have our own that we're in the process of making and tweaking so that our customers can rent you know, high quality durable but also fashionable furniture I think, you know, there are players out there you know, when you think of rental furniture, you think of boxy Gray, hard you know hard seats, those kinds of things and so we kind of really wanted to bring a higher level of like quality and curation to you know, the direct to a consumer primarily direct to the consumer population.

03:54

Nice. Is this mainly meant for like a rent to own or is it like a rent permanent where it's like hey, I'm in an apartment for a year and that's it or I know real estate agents that you know, do prepping up homes and all that fun stuff when they're going to show them so what's the target market?

04:11

Yeah, for sure. It's a great question. I think the beauty of it is what we really sell from a service is like that flexibility and convenience. So we have a lot of customers that you know, sign up for a 12-month rental they moved into a new apartment. You know, the best the best. There are so many great use cases for this type of service. You know, when you move in with roommates and you know, inevitably you buy stuff together, and then you part ways at some point or you move to a different apartment, and that like awesome sectional that you have is just not going to fit in any way shape or form. And so really gives people a lot of flexibility I think to not have to invest upfront and pieces that are you know, are not going to be supportive of like, you know, a pretty nomadic lifestyle. If you think about it. We also have customers who to their home, they just bought their first home, which is very expensive, you know, to do that. And maybe they're, you know, in the bucket of, we're waiting for furniture to come or, you know, this, this was my situation actually, we moved from Los Angeles to Houston and our stuff was in storage for months, and Fernish isn't in Houston yet. So it's not one of the markets. So I didn't have that opportunity. But, you know, you're basically not sitting on anything for a while as your stuff, you know, creeps this way across the country, on the mover's schedule. So we see a lot of that, you know, short-term rentals, interns, you know, going to my first internship in LA, I definitely slept on a deflated air mattress for the entirety of the summer could have been really nice to just like, rent an actual bed, and tonight standards or something like that. But you're not going to buy it, you're not going to buy furniture for those shorter temporary

05:52

times. What's your point? So Fernish is only available in certain regions right now? Yes. So

05:58

we're on the West Coast, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, East Coast, New York, and DC and then we are in Texas. We're in Austin and Dallas. But I'm in Houston. So I don't get as much of the benefits.

06:12

Close. Yeah. So is that because they're warehouse locations? Or what's the reason for the region-specific offering?

06:19

Yeah, so we're, we're very big into a kind of like customer service and controlling, like, everything about the customer experience from what you do on the website, what you see on the website, your shopping experience, to actual the actual like delivery and assembly, which comes when you do rent, or rent from us. So all of our warehouses, we open them in new cities, we employ everyone from the person that you know, is the driver to the warehouse manager. So it's all a very in-house experience. So we have that control and kind of keep it up, like the caliber that we want.

06:53

Nice. That's definitely the best way to do is to own the whole thing. I know that's not the easiest way to manage people. But hey, if it works, it works. You get to control the product, right? You mentioned customer experience. And I know everyone likes to think that these podcast episodes just happen. And like yeah, that's it. It's magic. But no, we asked you to help us out and give us a little bit of information on anything specific you want to talk about. And one of the things you mentioned, I was like, Oh, yes, let's do this. You've started to get into a little bit on the AI side. But you're also offering an AR aspect. Yes. Which I think is a game-changer. I think the AR side of things for a lot of brands specifically, in-home decor kind of stuff is flawless, because you never really know what it looks like in your house until you're able to picture it. So what is that? What was that setup? Like? What was that process? Like? Who are you using? How's it going?

07:47

Yeah, so absolutely, I'm excited to talk about this stuff, too. So we use the vendor we currently use as an epigraph for our augmented reality. And there are a lot of vendors out there that do you know, kind of do this, they were one of the earlier ones. And so we partnered with them pretty early on. And you know, it is my in-laws, for example, they're in their 70s, the concept of buying furniture from a website that they didn't get to, like, touch it on look at, you know, it just it's so shocking to them, that anyone would really do that. But a lot of people are able to, or will take the chance, you know, we have big companies out there, the Wayfarers of the world, like things that are online, you know, furniture, sort of sales, but it is a little bit scary. These are high-price point items. A lot of times, just even the thought of having to return a sectional is enough to like to make people not want to just click the button to buy it. And so that was a big thing for us, and especially around the size. Because, you know, it is hard for customers to even if you get a tape measure, and you know, I have blue tape here. So I'm always measured, you know, putting stuff down on the ground, but like, it's hard to really get a concept of what something's going to look like or store or size in your space. So we partnered with Epigraph and they provide us with you know, these AR we also do 3d Have 3d models that you can kind of play with and rotate on our product detail pages. So you can really kind of get a sense, you know, you see the product, you can actually see it in your space. I have a five-year-old. I think when I showed her the AR for the first time through my phone, it was like she kept looking behind my phone because she's like, it's not there, but you see it in the picture and it looks so real. It's in the space and it was really cool kind of to see how a child reacted to that. But I think it's really helped us. Especially with customers that are higher intent customers like they really they're like, Okay, is this sectional gonna fit or is this sofa only a sofa gonna fit? Oh, let me check it out and you can do it straight from your phone like in your space while you're set. the thing right there and kind of see, the piece comes to life, which is pretty cool. We also work with another vendor called Renovate and, they provide us with more and more on the styling side. So they use a lot of AI to kind of take our entire inventory or catalog and be able to put completed rooms and spaces together, which I think is another barrier to entry a lot of times different than like, a t-shirt or you know, some, you know, in the fashion world like, okay, you know, I like this great t-shirt, I don't have to know that it matches with everything in my wardrobe. But if I'm going to buy, you know, or rent a piece of furniture, you kind of want to make sure that it's going to go together, these are higher price point pieces, they're larger, the more pain in the ass to get rid of if it doesn't work, you can't just throw it to UPS. And so renovar we partnered with also, I think, a couple of years ago, and they have a cool style quiz that we implemented. And then on our product detail pages, you'll notice if you go to the website, you know, I've seen an entire scene will load and you can kind of see the product in context with other products.

11:08

That was very cool. How, how is that affected the conversion rate on the overall website? Have you? Is it been implemented? And it's like up and running? And now it's life? And you've done it for every product? Or is it still kind of getting rolled out? And if it's live now, what kind of results? Have you seen it?

11:26

Yeah, for sure. So we would renovate we've done most of our catalogs. So we've sent them most of our products that they're incorporating into scenes, they are so our I don't know if they would consider themselves a startup, but they also have been rolling out new features. So when we first started working with them, they only did bedrooms and living rooms, like their AI was only trained on that they've started to roll into dining spaces and that kind of stuff. So we've sort of worked with them, you know, in step function to kind of expand what we offer there. With epigraph, you know, it's we choose the items that are going to we're going to do 3d And because you do pay for those models and pay for that service. And so you want to be strategic about it. And so for us, the question early on was sort of well, is it? Yeah, the answer was yes, the big items are the ones that are going to be first of all, most visited by our customers, those bigger, you know, sectionals and sofas those bigger categories. So we want more people to be able to have access to these features, and then kind of see how it's done. versus kind of tackling like the lamps or you know, smaller things, which you still pay for. And you know, more people are converting with those larger pieces. They're not coming to Fernish for to rent a pillow, they're coming to rent kind of like those big pieces. So as far as you know, metrics, like we were big into metrics on the Fernish side. So um, you know, we are constantly looking at sort of funnels and performance metrics, engagement metrics, all that kind of stuff. And the data is really compelling. I mean, I, it's funny, you know, I, I always sort of laugh at, like, 800% increase in conversion rate, because then I just look at them like, Okay, how big is your denominator? You know? Yeah, I think, you know, we have seen we've continued to partner with them for the last couple of years, because we just like the data is showing us that that's, that's a good investment. Yeah,

13:22

that comment about the 800% increase is hilarious. Because an agency, I'll be honest, I've got case studies on my site where like, I can't showcase people's numbers. But like, you can't also be like, Oh, it's a 760% increase. It's like, Yeah, but what was it really? Like?

13:40

I've always had that. I'll push our vendors a lot of times to be like, Okay, can you like, Give me something lower, so that I'm like, a little bit more believable? Because if I see something too high, I'm just like, okay,

13:55

that's ridiculous. Oh, so the so when you implement the different products, I know, obviously, strategically picking the ones that you want to go with a lot of the platforms out there that I'm familiar with that offer like these different AR functionalities and stuff through the site, you really just kind of upload a CAD file. And that's it. And that's all you can do. In your case for furniture, I'd imagine that that is probably not available. So are they take our huge like sending them product and they're actually filming it and doing the whole whatever magic that they work to make that work.

14:29

Yeah, it's a pretty collaborative process. So, we don't normally get CAD files for a lot of our unless we've manufactured it ourselves, right? So those are those that are much harder to come by. We do work with them too. Sometimes we'll send you know all the images we've ever shot of the product will send fabric samples a lot of times if we have them which we do you know, so that they can actually like get the texture right. Then we go through this whole like iteration process with our You know, marketing team who typically have seen all the products because they shoot all the products also, and they go back and forth and kind of like they look at the model and they like, you know, pinpoint little areas where it's like, oh, this should be, you know, more curved in this way. And so it is a lot of back and forth, that we do, because we do want to make the, you know, make it as realistic as possible. Technology has come also a long way. And different materials, I think, are still being worked on anything that's kind of, you know, they'll vide where you move your hand, and it's sort of shiny on one side, like that's still a little bit tricky for, for these companies to really replicate. But it's definitely coming because it's come so far.

15:43

Well, speaking of where technology's going, right, like, so obviously, your whole job is ensuring that the customer experience on the site is flawless. And you know, you're going through that whole aspect. And as of this recording, it was yesterday or two days ago that Apple announced their Vision Pro or whatever they're calling it, which it's got that AR aspect, do you think that at a certain point, shopping is going to be getting done in that kind of direction, where it's like, you can just throw your glasses on, and then be able to visualize all of your furnish products in one spot? For sure. I

16:19

mean, we already sort of see glimmers of that, I mean, with this announcement that came out, we also we've talked with vendors in the past where, you know, it's they want to do like the whole apartment is modeled and your furniture comes into it. So you walk around literally to do an apartment walkthrough with an iPad and sort of see everything, which isn't, you know, it's a step away from like the glasses, but it's all accelerating very quickly. I think the adoption rate will be really interesting to watch because I think there's a lot of cool technology that still takes time. I mean, we've, we've known about AR AR has been around these, you know, these 3d models have been around for a really long time. And it's always kind of like, well, it's about to pick up, you know, mainstream steam. So I think it's like, I still think it's coming. I definitely think it's there. And I think furniture is a great use case for that kind of technology. Because it is, you know, it is so expected that you can't really walk into a completely empty house. And picture how you will live in it with your stuff, or even just new stuff, though. I mean, I you know, if you look on like Zelos. And that kind of thing. You'll see I think it's Monsey that does a lot of that, like total, like 3d staging of units. Which is, you know, it's expensive I was in prior to Fernish, I was at a company called Laurel and Wolf, which was online interior design services. And so we did a lot, both to like create the collaboration between a live designer and a human. And then also kind of like how you buy all that furniture that's recommended to you. But there are a lot of interesting players in the space there too.

17:56

In your expertise, considering the way that you're, I put this the way that you're kind of overseeing the overall customer journey, the experience that they're having, what is your day-to-day, like? Where do you monitor that and where do you adjust? Like how do you know where to test certain things? Or where to adjust certain things? Or how do you audit the overall journey?

18:18

Yeah, that's a great question. We, you know, again, I like metrics, I like to look at data. It's probably, you know, I've worked at a lot of startups, small startups, though, as well. And so I remember early in my career, and a B testing, like, it's such a best practice, like AB test, AB test, when you have like 100 people coming to your website in a given day, and you know, some small percentage of them converting, you know, AB testing in the truest sense of like, here's a platform like AB test, the new homepage, or this copy or something like to truly get to any kind of statistical significance takes like months. And a lot of times, there are better ways to do that kind of testing and to use kind of a combination of, you know, vision and intuition, as well as data. So I think, you know, right now, we don't do a ton of AB tests, like true AB testing on our site. We have a lot of people that come to our site. A lot of people convert but still, we're at an early in our earliest, earlier stage company. So we just find creative ways to test and monitor metrics. And we use a platform called a full story that does, you know, it provides us with heat maps and funnels, and we can watch the recordings of customer's journeys through our site. And so, you know, I tend to look at you know, I do look at the entire website, but I also like to kind of create micro funnels to really hone in on and I'm big into, sort of like, yes, it's important to undertake like to think of ways that customers will convert more or do more of the actions you want. meant to take. But I think it's equally important to ask yourself the reverse of that question, which is, why are they not doing it? Because a lot of times, if you can, you can come up with a lot of ideas like, oh, well, you know, we want to give more information, or we want to add this feature, we want to do this, to really flip it and say, Well, why are they not adding to cart? Like, what are all the reasons? Or why are they not progressing? What's creating friction in either the, you know, the checkout funnel or the, you know, came to our site to account, create, funnel, or just add to cart, you know, you kind of set these sort of milestones, and then look at these funnels around each of those milestones. And you can learn a lot by, you know, a combination of watching customers, which is the, what are they doing, you don't really necessarily know why, but coupling that with things like customer interviews or surveys, observation, I mean, it's amazing what you can do if you know, find someone, some relative and say like, Hey, sit down here, like, see if you can find this X, Y, or Z thing and just sort of watching these journeys happen. But I think that's really important and having some tools at your disposal to be able to like, you know, understand more of that is really helpful.

21:13

Yeah. Beautiful. Nina, you did a great job. This was great. So value is driven. I've had people on this show that have been interviewed on a bunch of podcasts, and they were, they were okay. They're not listening. It. Thank you so much. You did a great job. Really appreciate you having me on the show. I'd love to give you the opportunity to let everyone know where they can find out more about you. And then of course more about Fernish

21:40

for sure. Yeah, no, absolutely. I really appreciate it. It was super fun.

21:44

Glad you enjoyed it. Yeah, where can we find out more about you and Fernish so

21:49

fernish fernish.com And it's spelled a little bit funky. It's furnished, like the plant, and not just the word. And then you can find me on LinkedIn. I actually, for I've been in the technology space for a very long time. But I don't do a lot of personal social media. So LinkedIn is the best place. Get I have a five year old and I hate her watching the Doom scroll. And it's amazing like kids are a reflection of you. And so when she you know, I'll ask her like, how was your day she's like, I had so many emails and calls and pretends to swipe you know, the air. And you're kinda like, I need to kind of separate myself a little bit from that. So So LinkedIn is the best place and it's Nina Klein.

22:37

Beautiful. Nina, thank you so much for being on the show. Everyone else who tuned in, of course, thank you as well please make sure you do the usual rate review, subscribe, and all that fun stuff on whichever platform of podcasts that you listen to, and then head over theecommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes and make sure to tune in August 30 for our live 100th episode, which is going to be nuts. I will see you all there. Thank you all for joining. We'll see you next time. Nina thank you as well.

23:06

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