Making it Effortless to Create Your Home, Fernish Is Poised for Growth After Successful Series A
In 2017, Lucas and I set out to build a furniture company that adapts to meet our ever-evolving lives, offers us the freedom to change, and gives us the ability to express where and who we are. The goal was to fuse service into how we define our homes. Three years later, we’ve grown that idea into Fernish and elevated that goal into our mission of making it effortless to create your home.
And this mission could not be more important right now.
This is a tricky time for so many, and over these past few months the Fernish team has been very fortunate to serve our customers through a period of transition and uncertainty where home is front and center. We’ve helped hundreds of people transition to flexible work from home set-ups. We’ve helped create comforting home environments with details like lighting, rugs, and decor (our efforts were highlighted in Curbed and Well+Good). We’re donating $5 from every Fernish order placed to local charities that offer relief for those most impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
And we’ve done this while keeping our tight-knit team of 40 — many of whom are working from home like the rest of you — employed, energized, and engaged with our company’s mission.
It’s because of our team’s dedication that I am so excited to announce our $15 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures closed earlier this month. David Weiden, Vinod Khosla, and the wider KV team have backed some of the most transformative companies over the past decade, from Square to DoorDash, and Fernish is privileged to join that group. Joining Khosla in this round are a number of world-class operators such as Scott Cook (founder of Intuit), Jeff Wilke (Amazon’s CEO of Worldwide Consumer), and a wide group of current and former Amazon executives through Tapas Capital. We are fortunate to have the continued backing of investors from the real estate community like John Helm with Real Estate Technology Ventures and Fred Tuomi, the former CEO of Invitation Homes. And as a company proudly based in Los Angeles (#longLA), we are grateful for the support of our hometown community from our earliest backers, PLG Ventures and Techstars Los Angeles, to some highly-respected local entrepreneurs like Spencer Rascoff (co-founder of Zillow and dot.LA) and Eytan Elbaz (co-founder of Scopely, Social Native, and founding team member of Applied Semantics, now Google AdSense).
Raising capital in the current climate is a testament to our team’s unwavering focus on fundamental business economics and providing an amazing customer experience. Strong business economics are a prerequisite to building and scaling a start-up in 2020. And for a tech-enabled physical asset business like Fernish, executing against those economics gets more complex as we grow. This team’s discipline in radically improving our underlying business economics while growing our revenue by 10x over 2019 speaks to this team’s caliber as operators.
I’ve written previously about viewing customers as mentors and how doing right by your customers isn’t just the most important part of your business — it is your business! We’ve institutionalized that mentality at Fernish through our mission, operating values, and customer feedback loops.
As we move into the back half of 2020, people’s expectations are already radically different than they were at the year’s beginning. The accelerating adoption of e-commerce across all verticals and the acceptance of the service economy is likely to continue. People spending more time in the comfort of their homes is likely to persist — whether that be working, recharging, or entertaining (done via Zoom today, but shifting back to in-person someday soon — or so we hope!). The customer experience Fernish provides is right at this intersection of product, service, and home.
We couldn’t be more excited about the future of our company or more grateful for the confidence from our growing group of investors and customers as we continue on this mission together.
Sincerely,
Michael Barlow (Fernish, Co-Founder & CEO)
