This Startup Might Have The Blueprint For Your House Building a home is easier now!
By Ritu Kochar
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.
Decorating a whole house or even one's own bedroom isn't everyone's cup of tea. From the sea of data on the internet, it is so hard to find out how you want the place you'll live to look like. It's your house and it should represent you. If only you had a team of architects to help you through!
This is exactly what these expert architects with 26 years of experience are doing. Knowing the home decor business like the back of their hand, these architects will leave a great legacy – loads and loads of data and information about the home décor business they've gathered over the years through a startup called "Renomania'. They claim that there is nothing you've wanted to know about building a house you wouldn't find on Renomania. Co-founders Ritu Malhotra and Navneet are graduates from the School of Planning and Architecture who met their third Co-founder Rahul Lodha who is a graduate from IIT Kharagpur.
Interviewing Ritu, we found out that they say they are selling ideas and their idea can give you the house of your dreams.
From architecture to entrepreneurship
We have been entrepreneurs for 26 years now with A.A Design Consultants. Renomania.com has been a dream project that we, as architects, wanted to come up with after understanding the pain points of the homeowners. We have been in this industry long enough to understand how difficult it is for people to explain what they exactly want in their house. We have seen people getting magazine and newspaper cut-outs and online picture-prints which were all from international homes from international websites. The results, thus, were never really the same considering the difference in culture, weather and tradition. That's when we decided to build Renomania as a solution for anything related to Indian home decor. From inspirations and ideas to a community of home professionals and homeowners, the idea was to provide the users with all information on a single platform. Our clients would ask questions regarding finishes and costs and sourcing of products seen on foreign sites or a hotel they visited. Renomania is providing all the answers."
How does Renomania work?
We believe that home owners require inspiration, inspiration which comes from relevant content, variety of ideas and being part of a similar yet diverse community.
Most others in the Home space are in the Transaction space like selling furniture or in the Home service space that is to provide handymen. The content in these platforms is Transaction oriented.
Renomania is into the business of selling ideas. It is a community of homeowners and professionals where they can easily discover each other and interact. It is not a usual e-commerce website that sells furniture or a readymade look. It aims at attempting to maintain the fun and ease factor in home building and home décor experience. It is helping people "discover' – the kind of house they'd like to live in and the professionals they would like to work with.
Why need a home décor database?
Renomania is an online platform that helps homeowners discover a million new ways to make their homes more beautiful.
Since, we have a strong experience of 26 years in this field, we understood the problems that homeowners were facing, and we knew that someone had to work towards it. We built the largest catalogue of beautiful Indian homes, helping homeowners get ideas and inspiration for designing everything from a room or a corner to an entire house. Renomania also helps homeowners convert their inspired vision into reality, by connecting them with an ever-growing community of millions of other homeowners, interior designers, architects, contractors and product providers across the country. Whether you're looking to renovate a room or a corner or an entire home, Renomania is everything you need to create a beautiful home. With over 1,00,000 high-resolution inspiring photos of home interiors that you can browse, save and share, we wanted the consumers to find everything related to their home at one place. We also have a 3000-member strong verified active professional community, from architects and contractors to designers and more, who help make your dream home a reality. Consumers can findout the source of the products tagged in the photos and above all, get hundreds of tips and recommendations to make their home remodelling a pain-free process.
Future of home décor data
The digital world is booming by the hour and everyone is perpetually connected to social media. This change has automatically resulted in the boom of the online home décor market as well. People go online for everything nowadays, whether it is to buy a product or to get ideas. We notice an increase in adoption of online purchasing by a younger audience. Statistically, Home interior is a $20 Billion market currently and the growth options are immense.
We are targeting to reach the half a million unique visitors on the website by end July orend August this year. Simultaneously, we are looking to grow our catalogue to beyond 100,000 pictures within this period. We have launched our mobile app for iOS and Android users and are awaiting a new feature that will allow users to discuss their home design ideas and dilemmas with one another.
How they document works of architecture
Firstly, most professionals in the industry have not documented their work and are offline. It took a lot of research and work to track all the architects in the country, reach out to them and explain how Renomania would actually prove to be beneficial for them. We hired photographers who documented the homes for these professionals across geographies. To get access of thousands of designers and create a library of curated high definition pictures of real Indian homes was a big challenge. But, this challenge has actually turned into an opportunity as we are building up this asset at great speed and of course our content is not copied and is our copyright.
Secondly, to build a discovery platform is a challenge in itself. There is a lot of back end coding that is required to be done in order to give the best experience to the user. When we started, we knew that we want to be a platform where users can search for anything related to homes and the search results they get are most relevant. Tagging and associating relevant and multiple keywords for each picture have been a task, something we knew will pay off well and it did!
These professionals are so good on the field but believe that they need to work on their social media game since they're growing monthly unique at 50% month on month. Ritusays, "we are in the back to school mode. Spending nights understanding the nuances of the digital world."