Founder Series: Dimas Harry Priawan, CEO and Co-Founder of Dekoruma
Dekoruma is the leading home and living ecosystem provider in Indonesia, offering home inspirations, products, and services at affordable prices. It connects customers to home suppliers, interior designers, and contractors, through its four product offerings: B2C interior design service, B2B interior design service, retail marketplace, and property listing.
Dekoruma has been running for over 5 years and has made itself a household name in the home living industry. We have invited Dimas Harry Priawan, CEO and co-founder of Dekoruma to share his story and plans on Dekoruma.
Why did you decide to start an interior design platform and marketplace? Where does the inspiration come from?
First, the home living industry is a $10bn business with supposedly a very high gross margin. Yet, we came to realize from our relatives, who were in this industry, that the high gross margin could quickly go down due to inefficiencies. Missed deliveries and wrong designs lead to costly delays. There are no economies of scale where every project has to be restarted. Not to mention, the consequences; unhappy customers and contractors’ cash flow issues which add misery to the mega industry.
The dawn of ecommerce in 2015 enables us to digitalize tens of thousands of products, from sofa to wallpaper and then unlocks ways to digitalize the entire design and build processes. We eliminate issues like wrong product specs and missed deliveries. Customers pay 15-20% less and contractors attain much more net margin than before. We have consistently maintained an NPS (Net Promoter Score) of >55 in the past 3 years, a testament on how technology brings real value to the industry.
What is the customer journey like at Dekoruma?
We serve customers at almost every level of their adult life. The majority of our customers are millennials aged 28-38. These customers might need us as they start their ‘boarding house’ life and after marriage, when they typically rent a house or start buying furniture like bookshelves and work-chairs. Afterwards, they might come to us to renovate their newly bought apartment.
We started purely as an online platform, and we developed a Dekoruma Experience Center to provide a New Retail experience to millennials. Typically, our customers’ journey starts from looking at our ads or Instagram, they browse through our App and go to the Experience Center to look at the products and room-inspirations that best fit their desired home designs. They have discussions with interior designers and comb through thousands of interior materials such as wallpaper. Designers then share the design details through SOMA – the Sims like app that we develop to visualize designs. The entire project details are then sent out to respective contractors for production and installation.
How does COVID affect Dekoruma’s customers and sales performance so far? How do you respond to changes in demand?
We have seen more than 3x growth over the past two years. COVID has turned small houses into both offices and classrooms for kids. Demand for well designed, space-saving and affordable home furnishing has continuously surged even now, as our appreciation towards our home has permanently changed. SOMA has become a critical innovation that enables the entire interior project to go almost fully digital and uninterrupted by various supply chain issues and lock down.
One thing that we learned, our New Retail concept is proven a winner as it gives flexibility for us to reach our customers anywhere and everywhere. Our focus on space-saving and multi-function products has answered the constraint that our millennial customers need.
What are Dekoruma’s plans for the current year?
We are now expanding our New Retail concept to other cities as our main lever of growth. Our Dekoruma Experience Centers have given us a much higher store productivity as compared to any retailers in Indonesia. The combination of offline and digital presence has enabled us to acquire new customers that previously were either too expensive or too difficult to acquire from a single marketing channel.
We also introduced Dekoruma Property – a fully digital online brokerage just before COVID. We leverage traffic from our existing customers who have grown to search for their first house, and our 50 million+ annual web/app traffic. Not only do we provide houses that suit their budget, but also exceptional designs, turning their houses into homes. To date we have sold more than a trillion-rupiah worth of houses annually, and the numbers are growing at an even faster rate as we welcome a “COVID-less or COVID-free” era.
Our New Retail concept has extended beyond selling mugs and sofas. We strive to be a relevant platform that covers the entire journey of buying our dream home in a much efficient and transparent way where all parties benefit from the technology we innovated.