By Arbind Gupta. Assistant Editor, Business India

The Bengaluru-based Design Café, founded in 2015 by award-winning architects Gita Ramanan and Shezan Bhojani, is one of the fastest-growing home interiors brands in the country. The past five years have seen Design Café, backed by WestBridge (PE) and Fireside Ventures (which invested $35 million), grow from handling 20-30 projects a year to a firm that delivers three homes a day across three cities – Bengaluru, Mumbai and Hyderabad.

The Rs100-crore home interior solutions firm, having grown at 100 per cent (y-o-y) and designed more than 5,000 homes, now commands over 16 per cent share in the organised market. The company, which has five centres across three cities, aims to become a Rs1,000 crore entity in the next five years.    

With the success of the Bengaluru market (where it is the second largest firm) already under its belt, Design Cafe has also launched its largest home interiors experience centre in Mumbai (August 2019) and Hyderabad (March 2020). It now has plans to expand to other metro cities, including Pune and Chennai. In fact, the firm, which strongly leverages technology for enhancing customer experience and providing the best work in the industry, looks to expand its footprint to 10 major cities by 2025.

With the vision of democratising design, this furniture-to-fit-outs brand has been the first in the business to vertically integrate with its own designers, workforce and a 35,000 sq ft factory in Bengaluru, manufacturing all its products.

“Being one of the largest companies in a highly unorganised market, Design Cafe makes maximum use of technology in multiple ways that helps us in simplifying internal processes and providing a superior home interiors experience to our customers,” says Ramanan, CEO & co-founder, Design Café. “This includes both back-end and customer-facing technologies – the latter being of great significance, since it helps in differentiating us from the rest.” 

 Transforming customer experience

“Also, augmented reality (AR) truly allows an immersive-experience for our customers to visualise our solutions directly in their new home/existing home they are renovating,” she adds. “While the Covid pandemic has already driven customer behaviour online, with a higher acceptance towards digital products than ever before, an AR-experience, not just for loose furniture and furnishings (which is in the testing stages today), but for the entire home design, in a room-by-room manner, will transform the customer experience, and therefore, the home interior space. We are excited by the technology that is going to make this completely immersive experience a reality.”