The years between becoming an adult and settling down in a permanent home are a volatile time, filled with self-discovery, frequent moves and shoddy furniture.
Feather wants to help you with one of those things. The NYC startup offers a subscription furniture service for renters who like to live in style and keep their options open — and it just raised a $12 million Series A to expand its team.
“I moved six times in the eight years after moving to New York, and each time I had a completely different living arrangement,” founder and CEO Jay Reno told Built In. “I had to keep buying, selling and throwing out furniture.”
And Reno’s not alone. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, about 9.7 million tons of furniture went to landfills in 2015.
Feather markets itself as a sustainable alternative to the cheap furniture that's designed to last for a move or two, at most. The startup handles deliveries, assembly and returns, and users can add, remove or swap out furniture along the way — say, if you need to turn that home office into a nursery, for example.
Launched in 2017, Feather’s annual subscription service costs $19 per month, plus a monthly charge for each individual piece of furniture. The rental cost for each piece can also be applied toward purchasing it outright, Reno said.
Included in Feather’s subscription fee is delivery and assembly, as well as one free “change” that customers can use to add, return, swap or move furniture. Reno said many members use their changes to move furniture to new apartments.
Doordash has built an entire business on delivery logistics. And that’s just one portion of what we set out to build.”
Feather calls this undertaking “reverse logistics,” and the startup has developed proprietary software to manage it. Part of Wednesday’s funding will be used to bolster Feather’s reverse logistics tools and operations.
“When you think of an order by itself, it all seems pretty simple,” Reno said. “But the complicated part of our business is putting it together and operating it in a cost-effective way, by optimizing routes and doing inventory management. Doordash has built an entire business on delivery logistics. And that’s just one portion of what we set out to build.”
Spark Capital led Wednesday’s funding round, in which Kleiner Perkins, Bain Capital Ventures, Y Combinator, PJC and Fuel Capital also participated.
Feather currently has around 35 employees, and Reno said he expects the team to grow in the upcoming year. He declined to comment on specific hiring plans, but the company will hire “heavily” for roles both in software and operations.
Alongside the investment, Feather announced on Wednesday that it is expanding beyond NYC and San Francisco to serve Los Angeles and Orange County, CA starting next week.
