Case Study: Brosa builds a new furniture shopping experience online
Online furniture store Brosa, was created to help customers have a better online experience for buying bespoke pieces for their home.
Brosa is online-based but also has two showrooms, in Melbourne and Sydney, allowing customers to experience the products in-person to help them decide on what they want to buy.
Ivan Lim, CEO and co-founder at Brosa said he saw two big problems customers encountered shopping for household furniture, the accessibility of good looking, affordable furniture and the painful process of buying furniture online.
“The first bucket of problems was if you don't want the same IKEA sofa that all your friends have, but you don't want to spend $12,000 on the sofa, there was a gap of beautiful accessible furniture designs,” he said.
Lim said the second bucket was recognising buying furniture was this “incredibly painful, high friction high cognitive load process”.
“I was buying all these other product categories like shoes and pants, admittedly different product categories but they were being sold by digitally native, technology first companies and the experiences were seamless. I thought why couldn't buying a sofa, be this simple?”
Through creating a customer ERP system and tracking system, Lim said he wanted to remove the common hurdles customers face when shopping for furniture online.
Brosa’s first ERP software was a Google sheet and then was slowly built out with additional plugins, according to Lim. As time went on, Lim said the team at Brosa could solve a lot of the issues customers face through technology.
“Not only do you help create something that's more tailor made for a direct to consumer experience, where you want to give customers transparency, but also customers are really craving for that sort of digital first approach,” he said.
Brosa is a technology-first business, but not just with e-commerce, Lim said he wanted technology to be the infrastructure of the business.
“It's almost the rails by which you build the entire business on top. That is what we've been focused on from a very early stage is not only building the customer front facing stuff, but also building the bedrock infrastructure technology wise, that helps us to do things more efficiently, on scale and provide a better experience for customers,” he said.
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