Pepperfry.com:The Numero Uno Destination for Online Furniture & Home Products/Think Furniture & Home Products. Think Pepperfry.com Date:   Wednesday , January 28, 2015 We all have tried, tested and many a times failed to procure the best quality and deals in furniture and home products. For some, global furniture giants don\'t fit their pocket, and for others, the quality of small manufacturers doesn\'t fit their taste. While we all go gaga over the available choices of furniture in various stores, we itch our head hard to find them all in one place so that we don\'t have to burn our fuel roaming across the city to buy the one piece of furniture that suits our need. Owing with a commitment to fulfill this huge gap of the industry, Pepperfry.com came into existence in January 2012. The company grew leaps and bounds in this short journey of over two years and has successfully parked itself in the minds of the people as a brand built on three core value propositions of providing a wide variety of products at competitive prices while developing great experience. \"There were exiting gaps in one or more of these value propositions and thus, we chartered our journey to build our business based on these propositions in a strong manner which is reflected in our business growth,\" says a proud Kashyap Vadapalli, Chief Marketing Officer, Pepperfry.com. Today, this Mumbai headquartered company has extended its presence through new offices in Delhi and Bangalore. Pepperfry.com started its journey by selling just 150 pieces of furniture a month but today, the company delivers over 15,000 pieces each month. To its credit, Pepperfry.com has shipped 100,000 pieces of furniture till date. This was possible due to the differentiated product range and value proposition to establish its leadership in the furniture and home products segment. And not to ignore its strong supply-side which has the most exhaustive selection of designs and price-points available in the country today. The company has put in place best-in-class practices in the service eco-system across logistics and post-sales support. But for a specialized vertical like furniture, large item distribution poses a huge challenge. \"We overcame this challenge by pioneering our own \'Large Item Distribution model\' which hasn\'t been attempted by any other company in the past. By making significant investment in this area, we have built a hub and spoke model that covers a majority of our orders,\" explains Kashyap. The Large Item Distribution model enables Pepperfry.com for door delivery of large furniture items in over 127 cities and towns across the country with an unprecedented accuracy at lowest costs in comparison to the industry. The company operates a managed marketplace and its investments have been towards controlling all aspects of customer experience starting from pre-sales merchant listing to post-sale logistics and customer service. This has equipped the company to offer a standardized and superior buying experience and build trust among the customers. To some, these might seem miniature, but these efforts have paid off well making Pepperfry.com the numerouno destination for Online Home & Furniture shopping. Today, the company has over 75,000 exhaustive selections of products from over 1000 small merchants and more than 200 brands in the country across categories on its site offering an array of choices for the customers in various designs, materials, finishes and others. Its end-to-end sourcing process enables the company to get differentiated supply from non-net-savvy small businesses while ensuring high merchandizing quality. In furniture alone Pepperfry.com has tie-ups with brands including Godrej Interio, Nilkamal, Spacewood, @Home, Durian, and others along with 150+ traditional non-branded furniture manufacturers. Apart from the plethora of choices, the company offers a host of unique services too to enhance the overall furniture shopping experience of customers by offering free shipping and installation on all furniture items. There is also a \'carpenter on call\' service in select 30 cities including Mumbai, Delhi, Bangaloe, Pune, Chennai and others to help assemble and fix furniture bought from Pepperfry. With its rapid growth rate, the company is quite definite to earmark Rs.1000 crore by end of 2015. This will include ramping up supply chain, logistics, operations and work force which will multiply several folds and product offerings to get double-fold through national and regional brand partnerships. Pepperfry will also be investing heavily to enhance its supply chain due to which, the last mile delivery will see a tremendous growth reaching out to over 400 towns and cities by December 2015. \"While the market for other online shopping products has opened up, we still have to roll out in home furniture space. This requires building continuous awareness among customers. We will be opening Experience Centers in key cities by the first quarter of 2015,\" asserts Kashyap. These Experience Centers will be engaged in offering design consultancy and customization services to customers. The Technology Aspect A strong team of technical experts is engaged in developing technology in-house which fulfills most of the technology needs of the company. The team has built a unique code deployment tool along with an automated server scaling layer which depends on a whole lot of metric info gathered from the live environment to auto-create and deploy online. In a recent event of huge incoming traffic to its website, an e-Commerce company faced huge fiasco. To avoid such circumstances, the technology team of Pepperfry.com is continuously on its foot to develop frameworks which doesn\'t collapse during high traffic hours. Pepperfry.com is working on Apache Kafka + Storm Deployment. \"At Pepperfry, we realized that we have a large amount of data being consumed as metrics besides event notifiers. We decided to go in for a sort of a scalable and distributed data bus to ensure that the messaging layer doesn\'t collapse, when gigabytes of data are being passed through the system. We realized that we needed help in distributing messages under heavy load, with low latency and a real time processing layer, which can help classify the piece of data/message for further processing,\" explains Kashyap. This technology completely aligns with Pepperfry.com\'s current focus and will help the company build profitable, high growth business based on its strong marketplace and supply chain foundations and make the company the leader in the overall furniture industry in the coming 3-5 years. Panel Key Management: Kashyap Vadapalli, Chief Marketing Officer, Pepperfry.com As a core part of the senior management team which is engaged in driving the overall strategy and decision making, Kashyap\'s key focus lies in building the company as India\'s top furniture and home products destination. Currently responsible for marketing strategy, planning and implementation at the company, he is armed with around 18 years of experience in Marketing and Branding Management. Prior to Pepperfry, Kashyap was the CMO at eBay India.