Meet the founder of the ‘Rightmove of furniture’ who wants to make it easier for you to shop online

Deirdre McGettrick spent most of her childhood cutting out pictures from the Argos catalogue and creating mood boards of her own interior designs.

After a few years spent in the corporate haze of the City, her childhood dream finally became her full-time job.

McGettrick launched Ufurnish.com with her co-founder and husband Ray Wright in 2019, and the online furniture aggregator now boasts over 100 of the biggest retailers.

She tells This Is Money how she launched the business, which she claims is the ‘Rightmove of furniture’.

Deirdre McGettrick launched online furniture aggregator Ufurnish in 2019

‘Ufurnish is the Rightmove of furniture’ 

You could say that furniture and design are in McGettrick’s blood. 

Her father owned a drapery shop in her village on the west coast of Ireland, which meant she spent a lot of her childhood ‘gawking at everybody’s houses’ while helping her father install curtains and blinds.

Despite the ‘obsession’ with interiors, McGettrick moved to London after university having landed a graduate job in debt solutions for a major bank in the City.

Her interest in interiors piqued again after buying her first apartment and getting the opportunity to decorate her own home for the first time, but she found it a challenging process.

‘I had all this inspiration from magazines, social media, friends’ houses… I’d know what I’d want but I couldn’t find the products. 

‘So if I wanted a blue velvet sofa I’d then have to begin my search. Right John Lewis tab 1, DFS, Habitat, Wayfair… Then I’m scratching my head thinking, “Who are the other retailers?” but they’d all have a limited selection.

‘The question I was asking myself was, why isn’t there one place you can search all of the retailers, not just the big brands, and all of their products.’

After speaking with friends and family, McGettrick realised there was a gap in the market for an online furniture aggregator, and so came the idea for Ufurnish.com.

‘It’s very similar to the solution Rightmove provided. When I was looking for an apartment, I could go to Foxtons but I didn’t know the one man band estate agents. You want to see all of the houses, not necessarily which estate agent is selling it.’

Friends and family invest £1.8million

Despite McGettrick’s experience in the corporate world, the ins and outs of setting up and running a business were entirely novel to her.

‘I’d researched the market but I had zero idea of where a website came from,’ she says. 

‘I realised I had a skillset that was adaptable, so I went and looked for a co-founder [which] ended up being my then-boyfriend, now husband. He’d come from a startup so he’d been on that journey and brought the skillset that I didn’t have.’

Once McGettrick and Wright had honed their concept, they started to build a demo website – which she says was ‘not very sophisticated,’ to explain the vision that was in McGettrick’s head.

At this point, McGettrick had already quit her job to focus on her new venture, partly to show prospective investors she was serious but also because it would have been unmanageable alongside her corporate job.

Ufurnish aggregates furniture across 100+ retailers making it easier to shop online 

To get the ball rolling, McGettrick called on her former colleagues, as well as friends and family, to invest in Ufurnish through the Government’s enterprise investment scheme (EIS).

The EIS helps small companies raise funds and grow, giving investors significant tax breaks.

‘I suppose coming from a background in banking, I was fortunate because a lot of my colleagues were on decent money so could invest,’ she says.

And that they did. McGettrick managed to raise £1.8million from friends, family and colleagues in 2020 and spent the next year building an operational version of Ufurnish.com. 

Now the company boasts over 100 retail partners, including big names like M&S and John Lewis; but it didn’t happen overnight.

‘We did it little by little. We had to get retailers to launch our initial site because you can’t have an aggregator without having any furniture to search.

Some retailers did agree to be featured on the site at the demo stage, but others took a bit more persuading.

‘A lot of retailers won’t sell on third-party sites, but they’re not actually selling on our site. We’re showing the products, and if the consumer likes the product they click out to their website.’

If the customer completes the purchase after being directed, Ufurnish takes a percentage of the price.

Passion: McGettrick’s ‘obsession’ with interiors began in childhood, helping with her father’s drapery shop

‘Brands aren’t as important anymore’ 

When McGettrick and Wright started out, they were surprised to find there was nothing similar out there, particularly in the e-commerce space which is ripe for aggregation.

It suggests brand loyalty has become less important, although in furniture there has been little need to rely on this anyway.

‘Brands aren’t as important,’ says McGettrick. ‘When a furniture product is in your home, its not like there’s a brand on it, it’s not the same as owning a Chanel handbag’. 

‘What you’re looking for is an aesthetic – people will think, “I want a sofa that will look good in my home and is in my price range”‘.

‘Price is a factor but not a driver, the driver is usually the aesthetic.’

However, she admits that there has been a big drive towards value and the perception of value. ‘People are definitely more constrained [and] probably looking at where they can get the best value, adding to their favourites on the website and waiting for them to go on sale.’

Therefore, the introduction of a comparison feature was the next logical step.

McGettrick and team have tentatively moved into curation, where they group products by theme and tailor what customers see based on their tastes, although remain a step behind the retailers themselves.

She notes that people are using the site to browse more generally, going through pages of coffee tables to get a feel for what they want.

‘If you’re browsing more generally and you know you just want a coffee table but you’re not sure what type, we do see people searching the entire catalogue because they can’t describe what they’re looking for.

‘Lots of people don’t know how to describe what’s in their head, so they’re looking for more inspiration.’

Leading retailers like Ikea, not currently partnered with Ufurnish, have capitalised on this. 

They drive trends through curated feeds, solidifying themselves as taste-makers and ensuring customers buy through their channels.

Ufurnish is yet to implement this fully, instead focusing on making the user experience as easy as possible which McGettrick thinks will help to build authority in the space and give it longevity. 

This post first appeared on Dailymail.co.uk