Permutations in the online furniture sales market, or non-IKEA single: Home24 buys Fashion For Home

The European online store Home24 , which itself is the brainchild of the German company Rocket Internet SE, announced on the eve of the takeover of Fashion For Home, another German project that can be compared to the popular English portal Made.com. According to TechCrunch, details of the transaction were not disclosed, but apparently, we are talking about buying all the shares.

In addition, the partners announced that Marc Appelhoff and Christoph Cordes, the founders of Fashion For Home, will join the board of Home24, remaining at the helm of their project, and the two brands will continue to develop separately.

It is noteworthy that Rocket Internet , in fact, invested its own funds in the creation and development of Fashion For Home several years ago, and then got rid of its share in July 2012 - the decision of Rocket Internet President Oliver Samwer (Oliver Samwer) then seemed strange to many experts in e-commerce. The project itself was founded in 2009, and now it sells designer furniture online. The site profit for 2014 amounted to 18.7 million euros.
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At the same time, the acquisition that took place can hardly be considered a really lucrative deal for investors of a German startup - Acton Capital Partners and Holtzbrinck Ventures. At least, a really big profit is not expected here until the IPO for Rocket Internet, which has been rumored for a long time, and Home24 takeover may postpone the initial public offering of the Appelhof project and Cords. However, the German company is not the first among European startups that are delaying the IPO moment for their projects - the French streaming music listening service Deezer and, for example, another brainchild of Rocket Internet HelloFresh, allowing customers to order a set of necessary ingredients for making or another dish with home delivery.

“With the acquisition of Fashion For Home, we are expanding the list of our services and strengthening our leading position in the market,” said Home24 CEO Domenico Cipolla. - All this time, both companies faced similar global challenges: to revolutionize the minds of customers and become the leader in the online furniture sales market. We are pleased that from now on we can go to our common goal together. ”

Note that at present Home24 receives large investments and successfully operates in the key markets of Europe: in Germany, France, Holland, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Italy, and also has an office in Brazil. There were also attempts to enter Asian markets, which is quite unusual for Rocket Internet projects, but this strategy was not successful. As for the company Fashion For Home, it conducted its activities in the German, Austrian and Dutch markets.

As Chipolla notes, Fashion For Home was created in order to change the value chain for the end customer: “Previously, designer furniture was available only to a certain circle of people. Now everyone can buy it. To achieve this goal, we have created a solid team of professional designers, a supply chain and recognizable products that will be integrated into the Home24 system. ”

If we talk about the situation on the online sales market as a whole, we note that recently only a small part of transactions is carried out via the Internet, but the market itself is growing at a rapid pace. At the same time, IKEA , which is the world leader in the retail sale of furniture, continues to focus on business development mainly due to its huge shopping centers with many different accessories, counting on spontaneous purchases of visitors. But even with this strategy, the turnover of the Swedish corporation from online sales for the first time exceeded 1 billion euros this year.