Those with expe­ri­ence of media jobs in ecom­merce might not have noticed a new era which has been grad­u­al­ly build­ing momen­tum; Kalam Den­nis and Reham Fagiri, co-founders of New York’s up-and-com­ing qual­i­ty used fur­ni­ture mar­ket­place, Apt­De­co, call it the age of the shar­ing economy.

The shar­ing econ­o­my 

E‑commerce ana­lysts unfa­mil­iar with the term might pon­der a cou­ple of facts about the used fur­ni­ture mar­ket: not only is it worth around a bil­lion dol­lars in the U.S. alone, it’s con­stant­ly active. Fagiri explains:

“In the U.S., peo­ple move a lot. The aver­age per­son moves nine times after the age of 18 — so that’s a lot of moves, and whether they’re mov­ing to a big­ger place they’re going to need to buy fur­ni­ture or update their fur­ni­ture, or they’re con­sol­i­dat­ing and mov­ing to a small­er space, get­ting mar­ried… they’re going to have to get rid of fur­ni­ture, so there’s a need for this. Espe­cial­ly now [in the shar­ing econ­o­my age] — peo­ple are just more com­fort­able shar­ing their pos­ses­sions with oth­er folks.”

And AptDeco’s mis­sion, since its recent grad­u­a­tion from Y‑Combinator, is to facil­i­tate that shar­ing secure­ly, effi­cient­ly and with the min­i­mum of fuss for sell­ers and pur­chasers alike. Savvy ecom­merce man­agers might well at this point recall that there are some rivals in the used fur­ni­ture mar­ket­place, notably Char­ish and Viyet. But while, like them, Apt­De­co does take a cut of the final sales price, it’s no more than between 14 and 19 per­cent, safe­ly below the 20 per­cent charged by Charish.

Expan­sion plans

Apt­De­co also offers a ful­ly insured pick­up and deliv­ery ser­vice, so buy­ers and sell­ers have one major source of stress deft­ly removed for them. All the items sold on the AppDe­co web­site are ful­ly curat­ed, so prospec­tive buy­ers just look online for the items they like and sub­mit their cred­it card details for autho­riza­tion (sell­ers sim­ply sub­mit a request­ed pur­chase price). Pay­ment is tak­en auto­mat­i­cal­ly a day after deliv­ery, scotch­ing any risk of last minute bar­ter­ing at the pick­up point.

Anoth­er clever fea­ture which helps keep over­heads down and prices high­ly appeal­ing is the fact that Apt­De­co doesn’t keep any stock. Cur­rent­ly, it oper­ates its deliv­ery ser­vice with­in New York’s Tri-State area, but the co-founders are eye­ing up oth­er afflu­ent and dense­ly pop­u­lat­ed areas, both in the US and inter­na­tion­al­ly, for future expansion.