Guildery Raises $2.1 Million to Offer Customizable Home Goods Online

Guildery, a Los Altos based e-commerce company that offers digitally printed fabrics and other home goods like drapes, pillows and ottomans, recently closed $2.1 million in seed funding from Cowboy Ventures, Forerunner Ventures, AOL’s BBG Ventures, and SoftTech. Founded in late 2013, Guildery’s mission is to simplify the process of decorating your home with patterns, fabrics and colors that go together, and this funding coincides with the rollout of their new online platform that will allow their customers to customize the colors of the fabrics offered on their site.

In the increasingly crowded online home goods market, this funding comes as further proof of the critical role that customizable products will play in the future of that industry. A Bain survey found that between 25% and 30% of online shoppers are interested in purchasing customized goods online. Put another way, if 25% of the annual online sales of home goods in the U.S. (about $30 billion and rising) were customized, that equates to a $7.5 billion per year market. Capitalizing on this trend was the driving force behind Fluid’s partnership with luxury home goods retailer Matouk that lead to the creation of uMatouk, a platform that provides customers with a set of online tools that help them visualize different styles and colors, and how they coordinate with each other.

A person’s home is an intimate but highly visible outward reflection of their inner selves. The products we surround ourselves with are physical manifestations of our tastes, and our tastes are infinitely variable, unique, and vibrant. It follows naturally that consumers would prefer to have an active role in the creation of the items in their home, rather than simply picking them out of a finite list of available options. Custom products by their very nature generate enhanced emotional attachment; a custom product isn’t just a thing; it’s your thing. By imbuing products with our own personality and tastes, they become more valuable to us, which in turn creates enhanced revenue opportunities for home goods retailers that can facilitate simple, intuitive product customization.