Home furniture business is on the brink of disruption
Believe it or not, the home furniture business is on the brink of disruption and it will need to adapt to the forthcoming changes.
Clayton Christensen is one of my favorite strategy authors and his book “the innovator’s dilemma” deeply shaped my thoughts about innovation and disruption. From reading is work I got the understanding that with time, technology will eventually disrupt every business, on every market and traditional business models as we know them will need to change.
Currently working on the digital advertising industry, I am able to see how this industry is rapidly evolving and how technology provides the perfect platform for continuous disruption.
But you should not fool yourself thinking that these disruptive forces will only be felt by digital businesses or business where technology plays a heavy rolle. I would like to argue that the next major business to be disrupted will be the home furniture business.
With the advent of 3D printing technology, industrial design, custom made and make-to-order logics might be attain and you will be able to buy your furniture design file online, adapt it on an app to fit the place you want it to be placed and send the custom file to be 3D printed on your near by Kinko’s or IKEA printing center, that eventually will deliver it to you in almost no time. All of this without you ever leaving your chair. I would say that this is still a day dream for now, but with time, eventually it will become the future of the home furniture buying experience. Of course 3D printing will not provide you with a nice wood chair, but maybe it can fulfil your desire of having that designer polymer chair that you thought it would look cool in your home office. Eventually IKEA business model will be even more design focused and will be less about manufacturing in huge batch sizes to reduce production costs. This will have a huge impact on the way home furniture companies make money because once your product goes digital, you have to start monetizing it in different ways than you used to.
Maybe you will get your furniture design file for free if you watch a 1min. commercial, who knows!
By Luis Frade