Ok, get ready for some shameless self-promotion. Furnish.co.uk has finally opened to the public! Well, actually, it happened a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve been too busy being its CEO to blog about it.

So… what’s this “furnish” all about?
If you didn’t know, furnish.co.uk lets you can shop across the finest home furnishing designers and retailers, all from one place. There’s home interior photos for interior design inspiration – much more of that in the forthcoming months – and the social side, so home interior addicts can share experiences and fire interior design questions at our experts.

I believe it fills a gap in the online home furnishing market. It’s a fragmented market, dominated by a small number of generally low-end players, which makes it very difficult for people who want to find cool, unique and quality home furniture and furnishings. You know, those of us that read Living etc or Elle Decoration magazine. We’re forced to search through home interest magazines, brochures, websites of home furniture stores, shop displays and so on. Very painful.

There are of course already many traditional affiliate websites that aggregate the same ‘usual suspect’ home furniture retailers into one place, but they fail to solve the problem. These affiliates are primarily about inserting themselves between the supplier and existing customers, skimming off a cut of sales that would have happened anyway, whilst adding little or no value.

There’s other websites that attempt to catalogue the entire home furnishing universe, but they also fail to solve the problem. I don’t believe people want to scroll through 14,000 red metallic pendant lights, in the hope of finding the odd desirable light on page 23 of the results. They want to see a relatively small choice of lighting where everything is fantastic, so it’s just a matter of choosing the right one. Just like buying a home interest magazine; you want 100 pages of gems, not 20,000 pages of junk with a few gems thrown in for good measure.

And I believe that both of the above examples are damaging the home furniture industry, because they’re all about pushing the big brands with big marketing budgets at the expense of the smaller designers and retailers.

How furnish.co.uk solves the problem
Furnish is selective with the suppliers on the site, and even then, it’s selective with the products from those suppliers. Every home furnishing item on the site is gorgeous without exception. There’s no favouritism for bigger suppliers – in fact, it’s the smaller designers and retailers that we love to promote. All in all, we end up with a website that’s ethical, great for suppliers and great for customers.

For example, say you’re looking for a designer mirror. Every one of them is fabulous. Or perhaps a contemporary vase. It’s the same deal – the most desirable items from across the finest home furniture brands.

What’s coming
Having said all of that, furnish.co.uk is far from perfect at the moment. We’ve just launched, which means there are relatively few products on the site and virtually no interior photos. Of course, that’s all going to change. There are many suppliers of all types (furniture, soft furnishings, lighting, home accessories, etc) wanting to get involved and the furnish team is working hard to get them all on-board as quickly as possible.

Give it a few months, and furnish.co.uk will have become an indispensable resource for anyone wanting to do a fabulous job of furnishing their home.