Well Made
Kabeer Chopra, Burry: Shipping Couches – Well Made E44
May 15, 2018 · RSS · Apple Podcasts
Burrow aspired to create a couch you’d expect from high-end competitors without breaking the bank. Their biggest challenge? Shipping furniture through commercial carriers in compact boxes, quickly and for free. After negative experiences with traditional furniture retailers, co-founders, Kabeer Chopra and Stephan Kuhl decided to take their class project and start their ecommerce furniture brand while at Wharton Business School. Today, Burrow is setting out to make furnishing your living room as convenient as buying any other direct-to-consumer product.
To make their couch manufacturable and shippable, they had to balance form and function, to meet specific technical benchmarks. They reversed engineered their modular couch to minimize weight, and fine-tuned every aspect of their product and packaging to make assembly and unboxing functional for the customer. The result is a versatile couch that adapts to your life and space — add or remove pieces, flip the cushion for a different look.
On this episode, co-founder Kabeer Chopra talks about designing an oversized product for efficient shipping (30:40). He talks about reducing purchasing barriers through online product pages (21:08) and offline showroom partnerships (22:27). He also shares the hardships of scaling a product from prototype to mass manufacturing (7:32), and manufacturing internationally (34:00). Finally, Kabeer shares how Y Combinator taught him to focus on learnings instead of perfectionism (11:12), and how they’re innovating their packaging design as part of their product experience (39:06).
You can follow Kabeer on Instagram and try a Burrow couch for yourself at one of their showrooms.
Also mentioned on the show:
You can find this and all future episodes on iTunes, Google Play, and here on the Lumi blog. This episode was edited by Evan Goodchild.
