Pepperfry.com aims to ship 100,000 furniture units in four months

Online home decor marketplace says scaling warehousing, logistics

Pepperfry.com has taken two-and-a-half years to ship its first 100,000 pieces of furniture. Now, the Mumbai-based company expects to sell these many in four months.

The online home decor marketplace said it was seeing increased business momentum.

The festive season has boosted sales. Pepperfry hopes to touch a gross merchandise value of Rs 500 crore by January. It aims to double that by end-2015.

Founder and Chief Operating Officer Ashish Shah said, "Pepperfry has scaled from shipping 150 pieces a month to 15,000 pieces a month. We ship to 15,000 pin codes across 480 cities. We are directly supplying to 127 cities in India."

Having raised $28 million from Norwest Venture Partners and Bertelsmann India Investments, Pepperfry has been making huge investments in ramping up its logistics. Shah said the latter will remain a focus.

The company has 58 vehicles. It hopes to expand the fleet to 150 by November next year. Shah said, "Having our vehicles helps us reduce costs. I was spending Rs 3,800 for every piece shipped from Rajasthan to Coimbatore (Tamil Nadu). Now with my logistics, that has come to Rs 600 a piece."

Pepperfry is in the process of ramping up its warehousing. Shah was in Bengaluru on Monday. He said he had come there to finalise a bigger warehouse, among others. "We have 8,000 square feet of warehousing space in Bengaluru. I think we will need to increase it to 25,000-30,000 square feet," he said.

The company hopes to have warehousing space of 300,000 square feet by end-2015.