Furniture.com is rebuilding the furniture-buying experience for the agentic commerce age. In a PYMNTS SKU conversation, Cofounder and CMO Dan Bennett tells Karen Webster that by using standardized data and AI, the company is unifying retail partners into a single-cart, highly personalized platform.
Transcript
This is PYMNTS on Air, a PYMNTS podcast. In-depth conversations, expert panels, and exclusive research brought to life by PYMNTS Intelligence. In this episode, Furniture.com co-founder and CMO Dan Bennett tells PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster that by using standardized data and AI, the company is unifying retail partners into a single cart, highly personalized platform.
Karen Webster:Hi everyone, and thanks for joining me today. The furniture industry isn't known for moving fast, no matter how you define it, but that's changing. In this episode of The SKU, Dan Bennett, part of the founding team of furniture.com, explains how data, AI, and smarter digital experiences are helping brands cut through complexity and meet shoppers where they are and what it takes to keep up when the old rules of furniture retail no longer apply. Thanks, Dan, for taking the time.
Dan Bennett:It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Karen Webster:We all have furniture.
Dan Bennett:We do. That's why we like the business.
Karen Webster:It's one of those things everyone has to buy and they just keep buying more and more of it. And that's uh that's uh that's what we're gonna talk about today. I I want to start though, with something that I just said, which is we're gonna talk about the old rules that no longer apply. So, what are those old rules and why are they no longer part of how furniture retail should be considered?
Dan Bennett:You know, one of the things that is abundantly clear, and actually a large part of the reason that we we stood up furniture.com is that we felt that uh shopping for furniture was unnecessarily painful. Um it's a long-winded process. Uh it's probably takes far too much bandwidth than it should. Um I personally think buying furniture should be kind of a joyous experience. It's something that you put in your home and you know, you you raise kids on, you watch movies on, that you know, it has an emotional, there's an emotional quotient to it that I think is forgotten in the process. Um, I think the the the real motivator recently for change in our in our industry has been you know has been that of technological change, right? The ability for us to truncate the journey without disim disintermediating retailers. You know, we'll talk a bit about it later, as perhaps, but you know, we work with D2C partners and I think they have an amazing value, but the retailer is still very important. Retail is still very important in furniture. People still want to look and touch and sit and feel, and we have to work out how to marry those two things, and that's fundamentally our mission at furniture.com.
Karen Webster:So furniture.com, great URL. I mean, it's just so perfect. Um, was founded in 1998. So that was during the dot-com bubble.
Dan Bennett:Yes.
Karen Webster:You made it through the other side. Many did not. We all remember, you know, pets.com, the sock puppet did not make it. But you did in a category where it's not obvious that there were all the right pieces and components available for you to get to the other side successfully. How'd you manage that?
Dan Bennett:Well, um, I'm gonna go back and give you a bit of a um may give you a bit of the story of furniture.com. So it it is a it's obviously a dot com. Um it was founded uh, as you said, in 1998. Our version of this business, though, is new to us. It's almost like we need to have an under new management banner outside. So um the domain was purchased by our investor um five or six years ago. Uh uh that's publicly available information. And then uh we stood up a new business on that domain. Um, we started the business three and a half years ago and we launched the new site two and a half years ago. So furniture.com has had a lot of lives. So to answer your question, the way it came out of that was it didn't, right? It went through a variety of different experiences, none of which um we don't think were quite right for what the uh domain deserved. So we we you know we've built something completely different on that domain, which is not only the furniture.com you see right now, but more importantly the furniture.com that we will be evolving into at the beginning of next year, which is um I think category defining. It's a totally new way of shopping for furniture. How so? It's as I said earlier, it's entirely um what we did, and and you know, I don't necessarily want to bore our dear listener here, but we realized in the very early days of building our business that one thing that was missing in furniture, this might not surprise you, was um standardized data. In, for example, in housing, um the MLS is a standardized data set that you can build on top of. Zillow is a good example of that. They do a they do a great job of that. We didn't have that luxury in furniture. Every retailer in furniture has a different way of curating their feed, of um the nomenclature they put around their feed. So as we work and we work directly with retailers, um, you know, we're not a marketplace in the sense, in that sense, we work directly with retailers. So we take their feeds, but we knew early on we had to find a way of standardizing those feeds. Interesting, yeah. Before it was almost cool, we built a series of AI technologies in-house that would help us to take the feed from 70 partners, which is what we have now, and refine them so that when it came out the other side of the machine, there was one standard data set.
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Karen Webster:So if I'm searching for white, a white leather chair, I'm gonna see white leather chairs, even though retailers may call it off-white or vanilla or whatever.
Dan Bennett:Correct. But it's more important than that because back then we were thinking about how do we create amazing search. Now we're building for a prompt-based environment. So you can say, in actual fact, I want a white modern bouquet square chair with, you know, a prompt is much longer than a search. Yeah. But because of that, we need a data set that allows us to show highly personalized results. The reason that what the reason we're doing that is that furniture is the third most expensive thing anybody buys, a house, a car, and then furniture. So confidence needs to be very high for you to trust that experience and to trust that um brand. So we're building a tool that we think highly personalizes each result or each series of results so that we can close that confidence gap, so that we can move people more quickly to the point of transaction.
Karen Webster:So when you say furniture is moving faster, furniture retail is moving faster, you really mean faster to a selection of items that someone can buy using your platform.
Dan Bennett:Yes.
Karen Webster:Not necessarily literally, it's going to arrive sooner, although that's also part of the experience, the last mile, getting it actually in the in the in the home.
Dan Bennett:Yeah, correct. So I'll I'll give you some stats on that. Um and by the way, you know, I can't really comment on the manufacture of furniture. We certainly know a lot about furniture here. We have some real furniture experts, but we're a technology business in the service of furniture. Um, but I can talk to you about exactly what you said, the decision-making process. And we can tell you that um most furniture shoppers right now spend north of 15 hours on each search. That's ridiculous. That's too much. They also that we've done a ton of research with our shoppers, and they also have a tendency to um cobble together a variety of a variety of different tools in order to get to a decision. I'll give you an example. Um, when we moved to our house currently, we had a Google Sheet that helped us track who was looking at what and how much it was. We had a Pinterest board, which sort of set the mood for each room. Um, and then we had um, you know, then we would share furniture using screen, screen grabs and text messages. In 2025, that's such a redundant process. So we realized that we needed to uh uh uh galvanize those things into one site experience. And actually, you know, furniture.com currently does a lot of this, but the the new version of what we're launching in February um does all of that. It's it's a very complete experience. The final part of it, Karen, is um typically in any room um people will have four or more brands represented. People don't usually um complete a room from one brand. They might do it from one retailer, but not one brand. Um so we uh at furniture.com, you know, we are building and are and again are about to launch a single cart checkout experience, which is the first time ever. You know, certainly there are big places like Wayfair checkout there, but but they're not from, they're typically not the big retailers that people know and trust. For the first time ever, we're bringing all of those retailers into one cart. So you can buy across Raymoor and Bloomingdales and um you know, uh, Lulu and Georgia and one Kings Lane, but do it all in one checkout. Again, truncating that experience.
Karen Webster:And and and buying it sort of within the room experience. So, I mean, most people are thinking about the living room or the family room or the dining room, and they're thinking about how they need to furnish that and what their selections are. And if you see it all together and you're paying for it all in one cart, you're really you're really furnishing your room as opposed to buying a piece of furniture.
Dan Bennett:That's right. And you're dealing with um critically a single single checkout, which makes life easier. From now, from a business point of view, um, that's very additive to us. It's an accretive experience in the sense that you know we're we're building a variety of room planning tools right now that are pretty game-changing. But if you can build a room and visualize that room, or we can visualize it for you rather, suddenly you're adding pieces in, and that's adding it's adding to basket size, it's adding to average order volume. It's still better for the customer. Um, I think it's, you know, again, I think furniture retail is a is a sort of precious space. They're often big family-owned businesses, and the customer service is usually tremendous, et cetera. What we've done by standardizing data, I think, with our partners is help catch up to where what consumers are experiencing in a lot of other categories. They just don't have it in furniture yet. But um, that's the problem we're trying to solve.
Karen Webster:You know, Walmart and Amazon are taking share in furniture and home furnishings. We look at their data and it's about 26% of spend that those retailers get Amazon more than Walmart by by probably 33x. How does that what does that say to you about how consumers are willing to shop and pay and buy furniture for their homes?
Dan Bennett:I mean, the first thing it tells me is that Amazon. Um I know this only too well personally. Amazon has an amazing um lock on my e-commerce experiences because they have all my info. I click a couple buttons, I know when it's going to be here, right? So there's a sense of ease that comes through that. There's a confidence that comes from that, as I mentioned earlier. Uh, I I do think they have the capability to, of course, deliver that in furniture. However, I really believe the furniture buying experience is quite distinct, it's quite nuanced. Yeah, I think it is uh a reasonably tactile experience. So whether that's bringing tactility to life through technology or us, you know, we still have on furniture.com the ability to go see it locally. We'll tell you if this piece is available in store, here's how you get to the store. Go check it out. Um so I think this, I think that's important. The other thing I often say to our partners is Amazon has done an amazing experience, uh, amazing job of building an experience that will allow you to buy a paper clip on one end and a speedboat on the other. And they develop technology that that um is the master of many of those things. We're simply building technology for furniture shoppers. We're looking at the pain points and the solution for those pain points that are only focused on making furniture shopping better. I'm a giant Amazon fan. I think we can all agree they're probably going to be a success, those guys. But um what we're doing is very single-minded.
Karen Webster:So you're making the experience better. Prompt base allows the experience to be more curated. So you really do get the white bouquet chair with rolled arms and all of that. So you're seeing that. But but how do you then align the reality of it gets delivered and it's like I measured wrong or the arm sticks out and it's not comfortable to sit on? But there are a lot of things related to furniture buying that you can you can make better online, but there's then the reality of getting at home. How how are you working to align those expectations using data and technology?
Dan Bennett:Yeah, the the the quick answer is we leave that to the experts. And what I mean by that is our checkout technology allows us um to present a customer with a single cart, but from that point on, the uh relationship is owned by the retailer, which is how they want it and how we want it. They're extremely good. We we only work with um we work with the most trusted retailers. And the reason they're so trusted is they're extremely good at doing what you just said. So I receive a sofa, you know, it comes from one of our partners, and it isn't right, whatever that might be. We they're gonna be routed through the customer service of that furniture retailer. In many cases, they have a hundred years of experience in dealing with that. But what we will help with is anything up until that point. If they have an issue with our experience, we have a customer center that will deal with that, or we will um refer them to the retailer. But we don't we don't pretend to or want to be um uh a retailer in that sense. I think we want to trust our partners to take that part of the relationship.
Karen Webster:How are you navigating the consumer who is now increasingly going to chat and other models to do the curation? And of course, the models want them to finish the buying process on on those sites themselves. Because our data shows that consumers are using them more and they're using even some of the curated shopping marketplaces less because they can get it all in one prompt on those models. How are you helping to create the brand relationship so that consumers start with you and end with you?
Dan Bennett:Um it's the big question every day right now, I think, is how much do we lean into the LLMs and how much do we uh ensure that we're protecting our experience and and not disintermediating um the shoppers, right? So uh I think the GPTs, I think that the the the AI and the GPT tools help people get to answers quickly. I don't think furniture is one of those categories that people rush into decisions. I think if I'm buying a doodad or kitchen roll, you know, fine. If I want to go through an experience that helps me build confidence in my decision, right now that isn't an AI, that isn't a chat GPT experience. It's moving quickly. I think there will be um evolutions, and we already saw it this week with some of some new announcements from Chat GPT. There will be an evolution there. And at that point, you know, I would like furniture.com to be one of the default results in that setting, right? So, you know, again, if we're in the service of the furniture shopper, can we service them on our site? Yes. Do we want to can we and will we one day service them through those other experiences? Yeah, I hope so. I think we can.
Karen Webster:What are you what are you seeing now in terms of consumer behavior? What are people buying? And are people buying as much as they used to? Are are consumers nervous about making big, big purchases? Are they leaning more into financing? What is the consumer telling you about not only the experience, but their behavior and in terms of what they're buying and when?
Dan Bennett:You know, it's it's it's a good question. And actually, you know, in the last few months, there have been a variety of questions and challenges around tariffs as an example. So I've had friends of mine, you know, come up to me rather concerned about the business because of the tariffs. And I think one of the things that we're seeing as a um, you know, we represent a fairly level playing field. You can purchase um you know a full room for a couple grand on our site, and you can also find a $25,000 sofa. So I think we have breadth. Um, within that breadth, you know, I don't know that we're seeing a shift necessarily in buying patterns, at least not driven from an economics point of view. Um, we are certainly seeing um, I'm glad to say we're seeing purchases, uh, sorry, pieces purchased together. Um, we see that happening more and more through our site because increasingly people can do that in one place. Um, we're seeing from a uh, you know, we see it on the Google shopping side as well. So we, you know, we have a pretty big media spend, and we're seeing um what is indexing in that environment. And again, you know, we that environment tends to lend itself to lower price. And by lower price, I mean decor, lamps, rugs, those sorts of things. Um there that's an easier decision to make through a digital channel. We are still seeing that bigger decisions are being made on our site. We do see how that traffic behaves. We see that they probably spend longer on our site, they use more tools. Um, I don't know that we're seeing a drive towards lower cost uh generally speaking, though.
Karen Webster:Are people still going into showrooms to check stuff out, or are they really making it a completely digital experience?
Dan Bennett:No, I think showrooms are still very important. You know, we some somewhere around uh 70 to 80 percent of large furniture purchases are still made or initiated in store. Um, most people want to you know sit on or lay on the something that they're gonna spend decent money on. Um, and again, we're we want to service our partners as well as we can. So there is an option to view in-store on our site if you want to do that. Um we we track that activity. We know a lot of people use that tool. Um, sometimes it might be that they'll use that tool, they'll go in and check out the piece and um maybe they'll find an experience back with us where they can get that piece plus a few other pieces. Again, I think we want to be um we want to be in a creative experience to retailers rather than dilutive. I think it's it's it's an evolution in this space. And I suspect that online, you know, if you like online shopping for larger pieces may become uh uh more prevalent as technology evolves. But I think we're we're very much in luck with keeping that balance in order.
Karen Webster:And not having the surprise, oh, look, here's what it really looks like. Wow. Yeah, I didn't think the check was going to be that that dramatic. Um I've had that experience myself. Well, when when you think about though what you described, which is this really prompt-based, very curated experience on your site. You obviously have the re your retail partners and they end up having the relationship once the purchase is made and service the buy. But you're acting almost as the designer, the the prompt becomes their design assistant, putting together their room, selecting different things. How does that how do retail your retail partners think about that? Because the consumer is directing it and they have to make sure that their feeds are accurate so that when the consumer is making that search, they actually show up.
Dan Bennett:Yeah, I mean, one of the things because we standardize the data that we have on our site, um, it is very meritocratic. It's quite a level playing field in terms of how how product does show up. And it's based on a few things. You know, obviously it's predicated on the filters that the individual sets. And by the way, those filters may be activated through the chat function. Um it's defined on where they live, what ships to them, et cetera. And pretty quickly you can narrow down to a curated list of products that make most sense based on those parameters. Um, you know, what I often say to our partners is what that means candidly is that when they do get a sale or they get a they get a customer from us, they're a really high-intent shopper. They really through the process of refining what it is they're looking for, they didn't stumble upon that piece. You know, our traffic converts about eight times better than large search engine traffic. Um, and that's partly driven by the fact that we build intent so so significantly. Um so I think, you know, I think the the job we have to do is ensure that, yeah, that we want people to build rooms. We do believe there is an important role for design professionals in the mix. Um, we haven't developed that element of the site yet, but it's something that's on deck for us. Um, I don't know that even the best AI in the world can replace real human creativity when it comes to refining a room. Um, I think what we can do though is instill confidence in our shoppers so that they will, so that they'll build a basket and buy. Um, you know, whether or not they end up fully happy with that room, that may you maybe you do need a bit more of a human touch in refining some of the elements. Uh, I doubt you could have put that room together behind you right now using AI. That looks like it's a highly curated creative.
Karen Webster:Curated for sure. Yes, that's that's for sure. How does advertising work in this new world where the consumer is directing the prompt? And you know, in the old days of search, which still are the current days of search, you know, you can buy keywords, you can buy ads. Um, in this new world where the consumer is directing the prompt, um, advertising has to play a different role. How have you thought about that?
Dan Bennett:As CMO, we think a lot about it. So we certainly we uh we have a mixture of different levers that we pull in that regard. And I'll go sort of from the bottom up for you if you like. So one of the predominant um levers for us is obviously search. Uh and for for many years that was dominated by um, of course, as you mentioned, smart keyword planning, but also SEO, right? How how legitimate is our site and our experience? Um, that's still important. In fact, right outside my office here is our um content team. So we have an internal team that generates 60 to 80 pieces of content a month that lives on the site and lives in social and a variety of other places. Um that hasn't gone away. What we've realized in the last, really honestly, Karen, just the last few weeks is that some of the fundamentals of SEO are going to be just as important for what will be the new world of AEO or GEO or whatever we want to call it, um, with some nuances. You know, we know that human interaction with content is going to be very important for how it indexes in an in an in an AI driven, against in the large language models. So, you know, we're active on Reddit, um, we're very active in our communities on so on social so that we can prompt conversation and interaction with this content. Um, we produce and are about to produce even more um short form video, right? Video indexes very well, it's all readable. Um so those channels, those sort of always-on omnipotent channels are very important. That's not going away. However, the top-down pressure on our brand still needs to be there. In other words, if you're searching for a sofa and you come across a link for furniture.com on Google or through ChatGPT or whatever it might be, I still need to have done my job to let you know that that's a place you should go and explore. You can trust it, you're gonna have a good experience, you're probably gonna want to come back. We hope you're gonna want to share it. That's top-down. And honestly, that is throw some money at the problem, get creative, you know, make some beautiful work and uh and test and test and test. And we've done a bunch of testing to see what is working, but we do need that bottom up and top-down in our business, certainly until the flywheel gets going. You know, we're three and a half years old, as I mentioned, um, in terms of our version of this business. We have a big update coming in February, which will have further marketing uh dollars behind it. So we just have that old school job of awareness to do as well.
Karen Webster:Where do you see the opportunities for growth going into 2026? Obviously, you've got a big refresh that's on the that's on the table. I know your your marketplace and your AI initiatives that we spent a lot of time talking about are front and center. But are there product categories where you're leaning in or other things that are elements of the furniture.com experience that we should know about?
Dan Bennett:I think the um yeah, the short answer is yes. So there's there's sort of three sides to that question. The first is the consumer side, and you addressed that. We have a huge update coming from a consumer point of view, uh, which I think we think will make a big difference to this category. On the retailer side, um again, we're we're we think we're going to be a real force multiplier for our retail partners. Um, we do a few things. One is help them drive sales, of course, but the other is we introduce them to new shoppers, people that they haven't met before. In fact, we see that about 40% of our traffic for our partners is net new. Um, that's a real value add to our partners as they look at their own growth ambitions. Um, the third piece as it relates to growth would be our uh media uh uh ventures, if you like. So we're still relatively, we're still a relatively new business. So I have a big job to do next year and uh and the year after, which is driving down our customer acquisition cost, right? Thinking about how we can get smarter and be more efficient. You've mentioned some of the big names like Amazon and Wayfair and Walmart. Um there's no way we're going up against those guys on budget. Um, but we can go up against them as it relates to efficiency, we can go up against them as it relates to creativity. Um, I think there's an opportunity for us to take market share there because what we offer, as I said earlier, is uniquely built for furniture shoppers. Um, we have an amazing domain. It very much does what it says on the tin. All I need to do is get people here, especially with the new version, and they'll realize that um how on earth did they buy furniture without this?
Karen Webster:We we uh we talked at the top about furniture retail and it's moving fast. What will define the winners in this category looking out? You know, the next year is too short of a time frame, but as AI becomes more of a part of the experience in the next three to five years, what's the profile of the winner?
Dan Bennett:I would say there's two main pieces. You already hit on one. It's um trust, right? Establishing trust quickly. We have to do that quickly. But the second thing is uh the ability to uh instill confidence in the people using your experience, your site. I think that's very important in furniture because furniture is expensive. But I think that will be true of cars, it will be true of big financial decisions. Wherever you can utilize technology and the data that comes from your technology to build confidence, as we say here, confidence closes. I believe that uh those are the businesses that will do best. I think there are many examples of businesses that do it very well now, but in furniture, we want to establish that you you can be confident in the decisions you make because we've done everything in our power technologically to get that, you know, that sofa in front of you. So confidence closes, Karen. That's the message.
Karen Webster:Any predictions on when we'll see a Taylor Swift Travis Kelsey furniture line?
Dan Bennett:You know, I can't say too much about that. Um, but I would guess that it would be within the next 12 months. It just might not be through furniture.com.
Karen Webster:Well, I mean, there's a plug. Yeah. Make it make it worth their while. I think uh I think that's an interesting departure or departure.
Dan Bennett:It's a good angle. It's a good angle. And so maybe I'll pick up the phone and give uh give Taylor a call.
Karen Webster:Yeah, give her a call because I think she'd be open to this. I mean, start with the kitchen. She really enjoys baking. I was watching her on some of the late night. I love the angle. She's uh she's really an incredible businesswoman, that's for sure. Well, Dan, it was great, great chatting. Thanks for all the great insight about furniture. How the consumer relationship with it and how they purchase it is really changing, certainly being influenced by AI as everything is in this world today. Enjoy the conversation. Thanks.
Dan Bennett:Thanks, Kevin.
Narrator:That's it for this episode of the PYMNTS Podcast: The Thinking Behind the Doing. Conversations with the leaders transforming payments, commerce, and the digital economy. Be sure to follow us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. You can also catch every episode on payments.com forward slash podcasts. Thanks for listening.