Comment by charia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by charia | Hacker News Reader

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Exactly, I'm reminded of Berkshire Hathaway's Cort Furniture. It's been a couple years, but when I walked into a nearby retail presence they had the prices were fairly reasonable. They also do delivery and complete setup. What does this offer that Cort and other companies don't? An online presence?

https://furniture.cort.com/storefront/

Just browsing through here suggest they offer more flexible renting periods, (starting at 1 month vs Feather's 3 month requirement), and a website ui and design that looks fairly modern and easy to navigate.

Cort seems to have higher prices for similar goods (only looked at sofa's), but competing against a much larger corporation on price seems to be a bit of a bad business strategy. In the long run I would guess that if feather seemed like a threat, Cort would simply undercut their pricing in the competing market. I don't see what feather has to offer other than the YC branding and a younger target market.

All great points re Feather vs Cort. To add to the conversation, we see ourselves as different from Cort in 2 key areas:

1) Price: compare our prices and, across the board, you'll find we beat them in every category, for every rental length. True, it's not a long-term strategy of ours. But the reason neither you or I are renting our furniture from CORT today is that their prices are above what we'd be willing to pay for a 12 months lease. 2) Style: the overwhelming majority of their furniture is bland, and as one of our customers put it, "my parent's furniture". Our style is strictly mid-century modern and slightly modern, and designed to appeal to a younger demo.

Cort's main business is going after government and corporate relocation budgets. We are focused more heavily on the larger market, servicing consumers who are moving frequently (i.e. every year or so).

> Cort's main business is going after government and corporate relocation budgets. We are focused more heavily on the larger market, servicing consumers who are moving frequently (i.e. every year or so).

This might be the crux though; gov and corp relos are not cost sensitive, as they're coming out of a large org's budget. Individual consumers (your target market) are. An average relo package given to someone is ~$20k.

I'm definitely going to follow your org to see if the experiment is a success; best of luck!

I just had the thought that perhaps your target market should be companies that hire people who move frequently, not the workers themselves. You get some of the relo dollars, companies can manage their costs more optimally (monthly over 12 months for the employee benefit versus upfront relo/lower relo outlay if a worker opts into your service), and a relationship with an org is going to be more valuable than with a single person.

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