Deirdre McGettrick spent most of her childhood cutting out photos from the Argos catalog and creating mood boards of her own interior designs.
After spending a few years in the corporate haze of the city, her childhood dream finally became her full-time job.
McGettrick launched Ufurnish.com with her co-founder and husband Ray Wright in 2019, and the online furniture aggregator now boasts more than 100 of the largest retailers.
She tells This Is Money how she launched the company, which she claims is the ‘Right move of furniture’.
Deirdre McGettrick launched online furniture aggregator Ufurnish in 2019
‘Ufurnish is the right move for furniture’
You could say that furniture and design are in McGettrick’s blood.
Her father owned a fabric shop in her village on the west coast of Ireland, which meant she spent much of her childhood ‘staring at everyone’s houses’ as she helped her father install curtains and blinds.
Despite the ‘obsession’ with interiors, McGettrick moved to London after university landing a job in debt solutions for a major bank in the city.
Her interest in interior design was reawakened after she bought her first apartment and had the opportunity to decorate her own home for the first time, but she found it a challenging process.
‘I had all this inspiration from magazines, social media, friends’ houses… I knew what I wanted, but I couldn’t find the products.
“So if I wanted a blue velvet sofa, I’d have to start looking. Right John Lewis tab 1, DFS, Habitat, Wayfair… Then I scratch my head and think, “Who are the other retailers?” but they all had a limited selection.
I asked myself, “Why isn’t there one place where you can search all retailers, not just the big brands, and all their products?”
“The question I asked myself was: Why isn’t there one place where you can search all retailers, not just the big brands, and all their products?”
After talking to friends and family, McGettrick realized there was a gap in the market for an online furniture aggregator, and so the idea for Ufurnish.com.
‘It’s very similar to the solution that Rightmove offered. When I was looking for an apartment I could go to Foxtons but I didn’t know the one man estate agents. You want to see all the houses, not necessarily which real estate agent is selling them.’
Friends and family invest £1.8 million
Despite McGettrick’s corporate experience, the ins and outs of starting and running a business were completely new to her.
“I had researched the market, but I had no idea where a website came from,” she says.
“I realized I had a skillset that was adaptable, so I started looking for a co-founder (who) ended up being my then-boyfriend, now husband. He came from a startup, so he had been on that journey and brought the skills that I didn’t have.”
Once McGettrick and Wright had honed their concept, they began building a demo website — which she said was “not very sophisticated” — to explain the vision that was in McGettrick’s head.
At that point, McGettrick had already quit her job to focus on her new venture, partly to show potential investors she was serious, but also because it would have been unmanageable alongside her corporate job.
Ufurnish collects furniture from over 100 retailers, making it easier to shop online
To get the ball rolling, McGettrick called on her former colleagues, as well as friends and family, to invest in Ufurnish through the government’s Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS).
The EIS helps small businesses raise money and grow, providing investors with significant tax benefits.
“I suppose because I come from a banking background, I was lucky because a lot of my colleagues had decent money and so were able to invest,” she says.
And they did. McGettrick managed to raise £1.8m from friends, family and colleagues in 2020 and spent the following year building an operational version of Ufurnish.com.
Now the company has more than 100 retail partners, including big names such as M&S and John Lewis; but it didn’t happen overnight.
‘We did it little by little. We had to get retailers to launch our first site because you can’t have an aggregator without having to sort through furniture.
Some retailers agreed to be listed on the site during the demo phase, but others needed a little more convincing.
“Many retailers don’t sell on third-party sites, but they don’t actually sell on our site. We show the products and if the consumer likes the product, they click through to their website.’
If the customer completes the purchase after instructions, Ufurnish takes a percentage of the price.
Passion: McGettrick’s ‘obsession’ with interiors started in childhood when she helped with her father’s curtain shop
‘Brands are no longer so important’
When McGettrick and Wright started, they were surprised to find that nothing like it existed, especially in the e-commerce sector ripe for aggregation.
It suggests that brand loyalty has become less important, although with furniture there has been little need to rely on it anyway.
“Brands aren’t that important,” McGettrick says. “If you have a furniture product in your home, it’s not like it has a brand on it, it’s not the same as owning a Chanel handbag.”
‘What you’re looking for is aesthetics – people will think, “I want a sofa that looks good in my home and is in my price range”‘.
‘Price is a factor, but not a driver; the driving force is usually aesthetics.’
However, she admits that there has been a big push for value and the perception of value. “People are definitely more limited (and) are probably looking at where they can get the best value, adding their favorites to the website and waiting for them to go on sale.”
Therefore, introducing a comparison function was the next logical step.
McGettrick and his team have cautiously moved toward curation, grouping products by theme and tailoring what customers see based on their tastes, though they remain one step behind the retailers themselves.
She notes that people use the site for more general browsing, browsing pages of coffee tables to get an idea of what they want.
‘If you look around more generally and you know you just want a coffee table but you’re not sure what type, we see people searching the entire catalog because they can’t describe what they’re looking for.
“Many people don’t know how to describe what’s in their heads, so they look for more inspiration.”
Leading retailers such as Ikea, who are not currently working with Ufurnish, have benefited from this.
They drive trends through curated feeds, cement themselves as tastemakers and drive customers to buy through their channels.
Ufurnish has yet to fully implement this, but is instead focusing on making the user experience as simple as possible, which McGettrick believes will help build authority in the space and give it longevity.
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