Kurl-on scouting for sick furniture units to fortify home decor segment

Top mattress seller and now home décor player Kurl-on is scouting for suitable sick furniture units to fortify its growing furnishing segment.

"We are on the lookout for loss-making furniture units for a possible buyout or partnership to strengthen our growing home furniture portfolio,” Kurl-on CMD T Sudhakar Pai told Business Standard.

The company has been strategically expanding its product portfolio from pure mattress play to emerge as a home furnishings brand, with the new category witnessing significant sales in the previous year. It has also launched a range of sofas, catering to the hitherto untapped semi-premium sofa market in the country.

“From being a brand synonymous with mattresses, we are gradually emerging to offer a range of products and solutions that provide greater comfort at home,” Pai noted.

Even as the company is ramping up its home decor vertical, it also hawks its products to other lifestyle brands including Ikea, Pepperfry, Urban Ladder etc, apart from e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and Flipkart. “Although all the home furnishing brands are competitors, they actually complement each other in developing the domestic market,” he said.

Kurl-on has steadily expanded its portfolio in the furniture segment with 18 product categories, including sofas, which caters to the semi-premium segment.

Pai stressed the company’s focus on new product lines targeting the young and globally exposed consumers. The company also plans to launch 125 diverse products across the mattress and home furniture categories in the next 2 years.

Kurl-on units in Roorkee and Gwalior have annual manufacturing capacities of over 0.6 million mattresses. Its range of mattresses, furniture and furnishing are hawked through more than 7,000 multi-brand outlets and 920 exclusive franchise outlets.

The company is planning to expand its sales network by about 2,000 new stores by March 2019. Currently, it has 72 branch and stock points and 10 manufacturing facilities across Karnataka, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Gujarat.

While mattress contribute roughly 60 per cent to its revenues, the company is quite bullish on the new sofa segment and expects to grow to almost 50 per cent in the next 5 years.

In 2017-18, Kurl-on had posted a turnover of Rs 10.50 billion and targets to grow by almost 25 per cent in the current fiscal.

Pai said the annual domestic mattress space is estimated at Rs 60 billion, of which the indigenous cotton mattress segment accounts for about Rs 25 billion. “In the coming 5 years, the composite mattress space is expected to touch almost Rs 120 billion,"he said.

Meanwhile, Kurl-on is also planning to expand its retail presence across the north to 200 exclusive stores apart from its over 600 multi-brand outlets.

Kurl-on chief marketing officer Ashutosh Vaidya said the northern market was significant and the company expected sales to touch Rs 1 billion in the coming festival season.