Poppy

Using the $78bn market of furniture to champion the circular economy

Author

Quick Pitch
December 19, 2024

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Categorised as EIS/SEIS eligible

The UK’s EIS/ SEIS schemes are incredibly important for early stage startup funding, making the UK highly competitive for securing investment. At Quick Pitch we think it’s crucial to champion startups taking advantage of this super power even if pre-launch.

Today’s feature of Quick Pitch is an early-stage start up quickly becoming the go-to delivery and installation partner for people moving homes that allows consumers flexibility, lower up-front costs and a circular economy.

The Market

This week's business solves two major problems: 

  • There are 1,000,000 rental properties in London and over half are unfurnished. But furnishing a home comes with very large upfront costs that locks many consumers out of good quality furniture.

  • With lower-quality fast furniture comes a lot of waste with 670,000 tonnes of it dumped by UK households on average yearly. Only 17% of disposed furniture is being recycled in the UK.

One Liner

The furniture rental platform that makes furnishing your home more sustainable, flexible and stress-free than ever.

  • Poppy facilitates the leasing of high quality and sustainable furniture items to people who want access to furniture on a flexible basis.

  • Consumers can save on huge upfront costs to furnishing a space, allowing furniture brands access to a new marketplace of vetted consumers.

Quickfire

  • Headquarters: London, UK

  • Employee count: 1

  • Investors: No investors currently

  • Funding amount: Raising £500k

  • Business model: B2B2C (Furniture-as-as-service platform)

  • Traction metrics:

Due Diligence

APPEALS

  • Unique brand image compared to competitors: Comparable to brands like Freddie’s Flowers and Who Gives a Crap, consumer facing brands resonate well with their similar target markets.

  • Experienced circular economy adviser: Elle Tucker is author of the first circular economy book "‘Thanks for Sharing’ and brings extensive experience to Poppy.

POTENTIAL RISKS

  • Logistics: As an early-stage startup, logistics of orders and ensuring quality control with lower budgets is challenging to reach and maintain.

  • Early product development: There are experienced players in the furniture-as-a-service market to compete against whilst Poppy is in its early product development phase. Early product often lowers quality which means competing is harder.

Competition

  • Homebound, Loft, Cort

  • Poppy sits in-between B2B and B2C rather than just one or the other model.

Founders

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