How Eporta is revolutionizing the interior design market
Aneeqa Khan was busy shopping for furniture for her new London apartment when the idea for eporta came to her. Despite browsing websites online, visiting stores on her weekends and speaking to people who knew the interiors industry, she was struggling to find the furniture she really wanted to buy. Partly out of frustration, and partly in the spirit of any budding entrepreneur, she decided to go in search of answers.
“I realized that the reason it was so hard for me was because it’s really hard for professionals,” she says. “Buyers — interior designers and architects, mainly — find it really hard to source pieces directly from manufacturers all over the world.
“For example, if you look at a small shop in East London, you will see that the shop owner is trying to source products from a wide range of different sources, but because of the inherent inefficiencies they have to limit the number of designers or manufacturers they work with.
“That meant that for a consumer like me, who just wanted really nice stuff for my own home, it was really difficult to get access to all those brands.”
The AirBnB of interior design
Drawing on her experience in the tech property industry as head of strategy at Zoopla – an online property aggregator that makes house hunting more efficient – Khan built a new B2B platform that connects interior designers, architects and retailers with manufacturers and designers in a similar way to a company like AirBnB. “It gives buyers access to what is now around 950 brands globally and makes it really easy for them to actually find the items they want,” she says.
According to Khan, one of the big attractions of the platform, called eporta, is the breadth of items designers can now access, whether it’s big brand names like Terence Conran, Poltrona Frau and Tom Dixon, or smaller, emerging talents who might otherwise be hard to find.
“We are creating a meritocracy in design.”
“We say we’re creating a meritocracy in design, meaning the products really speak for themselves,” she says. “That’s the beauty of online: every item is formatted and presented in the same way.
“So if you’re looking at two different items, say two lamps, one from a small Hungarian manufacturer that no one in the UK has heard of, and one from a very big brand, the question for you as a buyer on our platform is which item do you like best, rather than which bigger brand do you already know.”
According to Khan, eporta also offers architects a number of benefits, including searching and discovering items, viewing prices and purchasing products.
“Architects can go online, to a closed platform, and have products from hundreds of different brands that they can search in one place,” she says. “The speed at which they can do things is beyond what you would do offline, or even online through Pinterest or a supplier’s catalog.
“Architects can also get access to trade prices. Of course, they have a budget to manage and getting those trade prices can be very difficult. With us, you can get trade prices for 900 brands within 24 hours.
“And finally, we provide an internal procurement team that can source items for architects and make sure that the items get to the right place on time. So it’s really end-to-end project management of the sourcing process.”
Building online communities
While eporta isn’t the first attempt at creating an online platform for sourcing interior design, Khan says previous attempts have often failed to understand the complexities of the industry and, as a result, failed to bring brands and buyers on board. What sets eporta apart from these attempts, she adds, is its emphasis on allowing the industry to embrace and generate online communities.
“We want to expand into the US and the Middle East.”
“I think the reason we have so much traction is because we are building a platform that allows the community to exist online instead of just having a website that sells items,” she says. “If you look at something like AirBnB, it’s great because it’s all about the community. This industry is also all about communication and building relationships.
“So for us it was about creating a product from the ground up that makes all of those relationships fruitful. We wanted to listen to our users to understand how they work and ask what is and isn’t important to them.”
Global expansion
Of course, getting an industry that Khan says “doesn’t like technology” on board with eporta wasn’t easy, especially in the beginning when they didn’t have a demonstrable buyer community. But with many brands and trade buyers using the system globally, she says eporta has become a proven concept.
“It was tough at first,” she says, “but now we get 10-20 requests a day from brands and we basically decide who we work with and who we don’t. We’re currently in 45 different countries on the brand side and our trading community is mainly in the UK.
“For us, the next step is to push the international side of things. We want to expand into the US and also the Middle East.”
Khan believes that while the interior design industry has been slow to embrace new technologies compared to other sectors, the industry is finally starting to wake up.
“For us, the overarching theme in the industry is that it’s going online,” she says. “At eporta, we want to be there to make that happen.”
“Inside Report: The AirBnB of Interior Design” was originally created and published by Worldwide Construction Networka brand of GlobalData.
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