Urban Ladder revamps brand identity; will be available on Amazon & Flipkart

The brand's new tagline is 'Let's Create'. Sanjay Gupta, CMO, Urban Ladder says their biggest competition is still a carpenter and they will watch out for IKEA.

Roshni Nair | Mumbai | October 27, 2016

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Urban Ladder, the furniture and home décor brand started in 2012 by Ashish Goel and Rajiv Srivatsa, has recreated its brand identity with a new logo and tagline and is opening up new distribution channels to reach out to new customers.

The brand's new tagline is 'Let's Create' and its new brand logo is intended to be a representation of an empty canvas. The new logo, brand identity and the brand film has been developed in-house by Urban Ladder's creative and brand team.

Sanjay Gupta

Elaborating on the reason behind the move, Sanjay Gupta, CMO, Urban Ladder, said, “The business strategy reason behind the move is that we are moving beyond our site. First we were only selling on Urban Ladder, now we will be selling on different portals and we need to have the same Urban Ladder experience across different portals. So we want everybody to know who we are and represent that in the same manner wherever we go.”

“The brand reason is that when we met our customers, we realised that they are very different and they put a lot of energy into whatever they do and try to make their house look like themselves. So we wanted to bring that joy of creation to everybody. We want to collaborate with customers during the start of their journey and want to leverage that joy of creating. We want to tell people that one of the best places to showcase your creative is their home. And that is why we are saying 'Let's Create', and that is why we have changed our logo and are calling it a canvas so that when people look at Urban Ladder they are inspired to create spaces in their homes that are a reflection of them.”

Taking the 'Let's Create' thought forward, the brand is also launching a new service where the designers at Urban Ladder will help customers in designing their spaces and the service will be provided free of cost.

Urban Ladder products will now be available on online marketplaces Amazon and Flipkart. Shedding light on the decision to collaborate with the e-commerce brands, Gupta said, “We are trying to partner with people with a similar mindset. If you go and ask people about Amazon or Flipkart, they will say their customer experience and customer service is really good. So we wanted to go to people who value customer experience and service in the same manner that we do. Also, for us, just the number of hits that Amazon or Flipkart gets is important. So many people come to these platforms, so why can't a great brand like Urban Ladder be there?”

Offline 'experience centres'

Urban Ladder is also all set to open up offline stores they are calling 'experience centres' in the next three to six months.

“Owing to some experiences we have had, we have now realised that offline presence is a must to get people to buy a lot more. We have seen that in the small experience centres that we have prototyped, our ticket size goes up by about six times to what it is online so we feel that an off-line presence is important for us to grow,” said Gupta.

Drawing attention to the challenges of marketing in a category such as theirs, Gupta said, “Right now only one per cent of furniture is bought online. The key challenge is that people are concerned about whether the furniture will fit and whether it will look nice or not. So the first thing for us is that whatever we promise on the site we deliver that and we try to give you every possible information that makes it easier for you to make the purchase. Then, in some of the categories where we feel that the customer necessarily needs to experience the product before buying it, like sofas, we have something called a sofa trial. You can go to the website and can pick the sofa you like and we will send you a single-seater so you can actually see how it is. There is also this interesting app where you can chose any sofa you want and it just projects on to the place you want it at. These are some of the things that we use to try to counter the challenges.”

Gupta feels that women make homes better than men do and therefore women are their primary target audience. “We don't really have a demographic target audience. In furniture, the purchase is more event based, like, for example, when you move into a new home you become a part of our TG. Then we have a life stage view. If somebody has a baby, they will have to build a baby room, so they become a part of our TG. So the way we define our audience is by consumers who want to express themselves through their homes, who have a strong sense of individuality and are ready to put in effort to design their homes and are at a life stage where it is necessary for them to buy furniture.”

Speaking about its marketing strategy, Gupta said, “We do not advertise much. Every time you buy furniture from Urban Ladder we try to make the experience very memorable. Our entire premise of marketing is that we want to build this brand one customer, one experience, one moment at a time and our entire marketing budget is spent on giving the customer a great experience. Three to five years down the line when we become a large brand, then it will make a lot of sense for us to advertise on a mass scale.”

Technically, Gupta says their biggest competition is still a carpenter.

“80-90 per cent of business in India still takes place off-line for this category. There is no one large brand in the space right now. When IKEA comes, they are obviously going to be one of the key people we are going to have to compete with,” explained Gupta.

Brand Film:

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