See how customizable, cost-effective and reliable Room214 is and why we built it that way.
Two ordinary college students with an extraordinary vision
When Kabeer Chopra and Stephen Kuhl had to buy furniture for their homes at business school, they were stuck with a common dilemma: do they choose inexpensive disposable furniture, or do they revert to a traditional furniture store that guaranteed good quality but could take up to 12 weeks to receive items?
This all-too-common situation highlighted the challenge of buying furniture, sparking a conversation for the pair of students — “What if we just put a sofa in a box to simplify the shipping experience?” Kabeer and Stephen saw an opportunity to improve the end-to-end furniture-buying experience by creating a modular product (one that could be made bigger or smaller by adding or subtracting pieces) that could be easily shipped in boxes, and done so affordably.
From there, Burrow was born,
Kabeer and Stephen had a simple vision for Burrow: to eliminate the hassle of furniture shopping. Their model simplifies that very issue: When the user goes online to buy a Burrow sofa, they start with choosing the size. From there, an innovative configurator
lets them modify the color of the sofa, the height of the arms and legs, and additional add-ons. Beyond the purchasing process itself, this modular product gives Burrow the ability to minimize the number of SKUs available while still providing extensive
customer choice.
After fully launching, Burrow ended 2017 with $3 million in sales and $4.3 million in seed funding.
The Burrow brand took off with consumers, and with an increasing number of purchases, it quickly became apparent that the site’s current ecommerce platform wouldn’t cut it. Stephen and Kabeer knew they needed an ecommerce solution whose capabilities were more readily available outside of existing product templates to create a truly unique experience for their customers.
BigCommerce Guides, Supports and Provides Solution Framework From the Get-Go
As told to BigCommerce by Kabeer Chopra, Burrow Co-Founder and CPO.
Many of the larger ecommerce providers either implement themselves and build the frameworks for you using your business logic, or they ask you to work with authorized third-party development teams. In our case, we have a pretty sophisticated engineering team, and also want to maintain a lean budget, so we prefer doing things ourselves.
Working with the technology leads at BigCommerce, we were able to get a comprehensive architectural and systems integration document focused on APIs and how we could achieve the functionality we have today. This allowed our engineering
team to ramp up quickly; in fact, we went live with BigCommerce in six weeks, which was very quick and seamless.
BigCommerce is a reliable platform; since launching, we haven’t had to do much maintenance, which frees up time to make improvements to our online store.
