Rearrangement in the market for online furniture sales, or IKEA is not a single one: Home24 buys Fashion For Home

The European online store Home24 , which itself is the brainchild of the German company Rocket Internet SE, on the eve announced the acquisition of Fashion For Home, another German project that can be compared with the popular English portal Made.com. According to TechCrunch, details of the transaction were not disclosed, but apparently, we are talking about the purchase of all shares.

In addition, partners announced that the founders of Fashion For Home, Marc Appelhoff and Christoph Cordes, will join the Home24 board while remaining at the helm of their project, and the two brands will continue to develop separately.

It is noteworthy that Rocket InternetIn fact, he invested his own funds in the creation and development of Fashion For Home several years ago, and then got rid of his share in July 2012 - the decision of Rocket Internet President Oliver Samwer then seemed strange to many experts in the field of electronic commerce. The project itself was founded in 2009, and is now selling designer furniture online. Website profit for 2014 amounted to 18.7 million euros.

At the same time, the completed acquisition can hardly be considered a truly profitable deal for German startup investors - Acton Capital Partners and Holtzbrinck Ventures. At least, a really big profit is not expected here before the IPO for Rocket Internet, which has been rumored for a long time, and the takeover of Home24 may postpone the initial public offering of the Appelhof and Cords project. However, the German company is far from the first among European start-ups that delay the IPO for their projects - the French streaming service for listening to music Deezer and, for example, another Rocket Internet HelloFresh brainchild, letting customers order a set of the right ingredients for preparing it or another dish with home delivery.

“With the acquisition of Fashion For Home, we expand the list of services we provide and strengthen our leading position in the market,” commented Domenico Cipolla, CEO of Home24, on the deal. - All these time, both companies faced similar global challenges: to revolutionize the minds of customers and become a leader in the online furniture sales market. We are pleased that from now on we can move towards our common goal together. ”

Note that at present Home24 receives large investments and successfully operates in key European markets: in Germany, France, Holland, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Italy, and also has an office in Brazil. There were also attempts to enter Asian markets, which is completely unusual for Rocket Internet projects, but such a strategy was unsuccessful. As for Fashion For Home, it operated in the German, Austrian and Dutch markets.

As Chipolla notes, Fashion For Home was created in order to change the value chain for the end customer: “Previously, designer furniture was available only to a certain circle of people. Now everyone can buy it. To achieve this, we have created a close-knit team of professional designers, a supply chain and recognizable products that will be integrated into the Home24 system. ”

If we talk about the situation in the online sales market as a whole, we note that recently only a small part of transactions are carried out via the Internet, but the market itself is growing rapidly. At the same time, IKEA, which is a world leader in furniture retail, still focuses on business development mainly due to its huge shopping centers with many different accessories, counting on spontaneous purchases of visitors. But even taking into account such a strategy, the Swedish corporation’s turnover from online sales for the first time exceeded 1 billion euros this year.