Foyr.com, now a B2C portal, brings 3D tech to help customers design their homes

Foyr.com, a Hyderabad-based online home decor solutions start-up, has transformed itself into a business-to-consumer (B2C) portal from a business-to-business (B2B) portal. Earlier known as Renderology, a technology-backed B2B, it was founded in 2014 by Shailesh Goswami, 41, an MTech from IIT-Delhi and MBA. The word ‘foyr’ means an open entrance area or a lobby.

Launched in July 2015, the company aims to help a customer design a home swiftly using technology solutions. It lays claim to being the first local marketplace for home décor.

“This means, we get customers to local shops. Local marketplace has immense benefits. There are shorter lead times to delivery, there are trusted brands for the last several years, there are exchanges and clearances and there is better post delivery support. Foyr can enable all of this without investing a lot of its own money, leveraging the existing local players. Foyr is technology led (not e-commerce led),” says Goswami.

Using the company’s 3D proprietary technology, users can experiment with various patterns, colours, textures, material and product options to get an actual feel of placement, space utilisation and theme in their ‘real’ living environment.

The estimated market size for home decor (furniture and hard furnishings)  in India is expected to go up to $30 billion in 2020 from the present $20 billion, according to a Teknopak survey. Of this, 99 percent is offline and fragmented, says Goswami.

Though the home decor space has some well-known players, Goswami says the company’s USP is that “we are the first end-to-end automated interior designing portal. We help customers with the tools and information to create their own designs and execute them. Every design is customisable and personalize-able.”

Foyr.com received seed funding of $660,000 from Brick Eagle last year and another round of $1 million from Astarc Ventures. The company plans to use this money towards strengthening its technology team, marketing and customer acquisition, and vendor acquisition. It also plans to scale operations soon to Pune and Bangalore and then to all metro cities in two year’s time.

It will soon launch an app – Go Mobile, a Google cardboard enabled augmented reality Android app that will help users to take a picture of their room and drag-drop resize furniture items from Foyr’s virtual furniture, says Goswami.

“At Foyr, we are targeting customers who are internet-savvy and have a preference of buying offline especially in the high involvement furniture category. We want to enable users to visually try online, but buy offline through our network of local stores,” says Goswami.

The business model is two-pronged: subscriptions and transactions. Subscription fees are collected from partner stores to digitise and list their inventory on Foyr. The company will soon enable  transactions, says Goswami. It expects Rs 10 crore revenue next fiscal.

The company  has also filed for two patents in India and the US around its 3D visualisation technology and “Like-This” similarity algorithm.