Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by brucephillips 3062 days ago
I can't innovate on furniture directly, but maybe on the design, manufacturing, and distribution processes around it. I have no idea how this industry is structured, but here are some ideas.

- Made to order furniture. Let users design their own, or at least mix and match high level componets at a finer detail than ikea.

- High end IKEA. Combine the flexibility of Ikea with high end designs and materials.

- High level office furnishing service. Companies provide a high level description of their furnishing problem, rather than choosing specific items. I'm sure these consultants already exist, but maybe it can be done in a more automated, scalable way.

- bid/ask interface for used furniture markets. This would enable sellers to passively sell items.

- used marketplace that uses ML to extract features from pics. I think this may already exist. Not sure.

1 comments

Very nice! You hit close to home here! Several ideas that are definitely worth looking into. My problems, which might not be profitable to fix, are:

Very few pieces are composable, we need more things like https://www.prettypegs.com/ Unless you have the capability to build a new IKEA, this is to me the best venue for providing high quality customizability.

Finding furniture is a mess. There's missing information (dimensions, max load), close to useless search, and a bunch of places that sell the same things.