Superfurnish Launches Next Day Delivery on IKEA Furniture

Ever wanted to buy furniture online, without renting a truck, lugging furniture home, or waiting weeks for it to be delivered, for an additional $100-300? I recently met one of the founders of Superfurnish, a next day delivery website for furniture, directly from local furniture stores like IKEA. After moving from San Francisco, where he was building iPhone apps for several years, into an empty apartment in Cardiff, he realized how hard it was to order furniture online. He almost gave up in frustration, then instead teamed up with a friend to build Superfurnish.

The problem with buying furniture online is ordering from Amazon, where I buy everything down to my toilet paper thanks to Prime, is generally synonymous with buying cheap, fiberboard, throwaway furniture. But I don’t shop for furniture at Walmart for that reason. Some sites like Wayfair and Allmodern are now offering “free” delivery, directly from manufacturers, but it takes as long as 8 weeks of sitting on the floor to receive that my new leather couch, and the prices are crazy high. Superfurnish aims to offer the speed and convenience of Amazon to furniture shopping.

I placed an order for a new bookcase (I like the utilitarian look of the NORNÄS, if you’re curious), received a text message to confirm and schedule the delivery, and the next day the Superfurnish delivery folks kindly picked up my new bookcase from IKEA and delivered it in the 30 minute time window I’d chosen. No truck, no lines, no waiting. Just magic. I’d seen the future.

Of course I was curious about how Superfurnish makes money, since the delivery charge is an almost too reasonable $15. Ryan, one of the founders who is from Poway, told me that they can offer in-store prices, and even happiness guarantees with free return pickups, because the stores themselves compensate Superfurnish, so buyers get the same price as they would in-store. Furniture is generally not cheap, but it may as well be convenient to buy.

Superfurnish officially launches September 1st, but is available for preview here in San Diego now, and plans to expand to more stores (as the site hints at West Elm) shortly. You can check it out at superfurnish.net (dot net, not dot com).