Urban Natural Furniture: Where Ethics and Sustainability Meets
But the realities of living this way aren’t quite as exciting.
Often, moving home — even just across the city — means throwing old furniture to the curb (almost 10 million tons of furniture end up in North American landfills each year) and spending any free time shopping for new pieces to try and make your new living space feel like home.
Fernish’s co-founders Lucas Dickey and Michael Barlow experienced this first hand as they started their careers in Los Angeles and the pair decided they could change the industry for the better and shift away from cheaply made, self-assembled furniture that you’re forced to throw away after a single use.
To learn more about how furniture rental company Fernish is changing the furniture industry, we spoke with its co-founder Michael Barlow...
Q&A with Michael Barlow, Co-Founder & CEO
On the inspiration to start Fernish...
Personal pain points. Setting up an apartment or home today is an exhausting process of buying, building, moving, storing, selling, disposing furniture. And that's the general experience with furniture retail retail. When we were brainstorming this concept in early 2017, we kept asking ourselves the questions, “Why doesn’t the space where we live adapt to us? Why doesn’t it progress with us to match the new jobs we take, the new cities we move to, the new relationships we find ourselves in?" Or using a real-time example, when we’re all of sudden forced to work from home, why isn’t there a service for on-demand home office setups for only as long as we need them for? There was a better customer experience to be had, and we've built that with Fernish.
Setting up an apartment or home today is an exhausting process of buying, building, moving, storing, selling, disposing furniture.
On furniture's role in making a home...
A very core one. How you decorate your space reflects your personality, your energy, your environment. And that goes for everything from the furniture and decor to the rugs and the lighting.
On younger generations moving more...
We've found that our generations - from Millennial to Gen-Z - are less excited to own things early in life than previous generations were. We've also found that time is valued differently by these generations, with a high premium being placed on convenience and flexibility. Those are the dynamics that we've built our business around - and hoping that these resonate with you a bit as well.
We've found that our generations - from Millennial to Gen-Z - are less excited to own things early in life than previous generations were. We've also found that time is valued differently by these generations, with a high premium being placed on convenience and flexibility.
On moving away from "fast furniture"...
Our higher purpose at Fernish is to keep low-quality, single-use furniture out of circulation to begin with. General waste is a massive problem in furniture, just like it is with apparel (almost 10 million tons of furniture end up in North American landfills each year - and almost 20 million tons globally). Fernish is a circular-economy business in that we reutilize products multiple times through our in-house curation and refurbishment processes to ultimately extend its useful life.
On Fernish's mission...
Fernish's mission is to make it effortless to create your home. And it's a mission we're incredibly proud to have.
