mydeco.com, a new UK-based home decor intermediary with some innovative interior decorating tools, launches today with backing from a who’s who of European investors, reports TechCrunch UK. Mydeco is the latest startup for UK founder and executive chairman Brent Hoberman since he exited from Lastminute.com via a sale to Travelocity in May 2005 for $1.1bn dollars.
Around 500 retailers are aggregated into a site offering over a one million products. Users will be able to build 3D models of their rooms and add their preferred decor as well as 3D models of 20,000 items of real furniture they can buy. The rooms themselves will form the content of a user’s profile, creating a social community around ‘rooms’. Each room design will – eventually – be shareable on Facebook, MySpace etc via widgets and applications. And mydeco has an additional Etsy-like, micro-affiliate model. Any small interior design business or an individual can upload a room design. If someone buys a sofa from that design, that designer will get a small revenue share from that sale.
SPARK Ventures are the lead investors in mydeco and have been joined by Lord Rothschild’s family interests, VC firm Arts Alliance, Marc Samwer (co-founder European Founders Fund) and Atomico Investments, co-founded by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, founders of Skype and Joost. More investors are listed here. mydeco has a highly experienced management and engineering team, many of whom are ex-Lastminute.
The prize is a slice of the $40 billion home decor market in the UK, and eventually the US, where the market is well past $100 billion. Through a combination of search, 3D visualization, affiliate schemes and advertising mydeo hopes to be bringing in revenues of around $1 billion in the UK alone in three years time. This is a pretty serious play. Although furniture stores are hurting in the credit crunch they are likely to put money into intermediaries like this to increase customer acquisition during tough times ahead.
interesting concept and some heavy hitting vc’s
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Where are people in the US going to get money to spend on their home decor? They can no longer pull equity out of their house. That means no new sofa.
The website looks very well designed and given that designers can build rooms for others to see its just awesome. I hope they are able to collect some referral money or figured out how they could get monetary credit if people watch it online and go offline to buy stuff just to feel the material or see how it looks in a different light.
one things for sure . They know about PR. have already come across their site pr blurb from several internet sites , british newspapers and even the BBC breakfast news.
Groovy
I love the tagline.. “Its wipe your feet and come on in!” witty one!
Didn’t like the example room designs or individual items shown much. Designer stuff & real world requirements are very different. Are we again making simple things over complicated ?
StyleEstate is a new home decor social site with some similarities. StyleEstate lets you upload photos of various spaces in your home. Then you can install their product grabber toolbar extension which gives you the ability to parse any product landing page around the net and link your space to that product. A thumbnail appears next to your photo of the product. This way people can show off how they “get the look”. Additionally you can see what that product looks like in any other space which has that product used. It lets people see what home decor products look like in multiple settings before actually buying something. Additionally, if they are interested in the product they will be able to find a wide selection of complimentary products that other people have used.
The link to StyleEstate is http://www.styleestate.com
I really like how social shopping is becoming more compartmentalized into niches and allowing for some really innovative experience like StyleEstate and MyDeco.
Technology is getting crazy! Its amazing that just 2 years ago, ideas like this wouldn’t have been imaginable. Great idea!