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Stephen Kuhl, CEO and co-founder of direct-to-consumer furniture company Burrow, has been shepherding his company through a period of double-digit growth. And as “young” company, Kuhl is confident there’s still room for progress.
Burrow, now a business with $63 million in funding, has seen compound annual growth at a rate “north of 80%,” said Kuhl, and it was more than 100% during the pandemic, when demand for home furnishings was at its peak.
Launched in 2017 with co-founder and fellow college classmate Kabeer Chopra, Burrow was born — as many online brands are — from a perceived gap in the traditional furnishings marketplace, which in this case was a desire to optimize peoples’ need for a quality, yet affordable sofa that was also easily deliverable.
Since its beginning, Kuhl has overseen the brand’s expansion into new categories — indoor dining being the most recent one — using a fact-finding process to figure out which attributes should go into the newest sofa bed, dining table or wall unit. “We talk to our customers and do a lot research,” he explained, asking questions such as how do they live with a piece, or how do they move with it? “We try to uncover the insights.”
And by doing the design themselves, rather than buying just what’s available from factories, Kuhl said they’ve hit upon a formula that works. “It’s the little details that resonate with our customers,” he said.
Along with its continued new product introductions, Burrow is also building its showroom base, having recently added Chicago to the roster that includes New York’s SoHo neighborhood, Boston, Atlanta and Los Angeles.
“We use our showrooms as a tool to support our customers on their shopping journey,” said Kuhl. The plan, he said, is to open more sites but purposefully. “We have a formula with a certain number of customers within a market or a density of the area. If you spend enough time on the data, it’s formulaic,” he explained. “We’re currently looking at a lot of places, and when we find something, we’ll jump on it. We’re actually looking at multiple cities.”
While Kuhl said “we’ll always be in showrooms,” he is equally adamant that Burrow won’t sell its furniture directly from its brick-and-mortar locations. “There’s no way to store our product (which may come in one or more boxes for at-home assembly), and we deliver fast and free, so we don’t need to sell from stores,” he said.
Burrow’s growth has led to production diversification as well. The first factory it used was in Mexico; then it added manufacturing in Mississippi and North Carolina. Today, Burrow’s products are still made in North Carolina and Mexico, but it has expanded to Vietnam, Poland and India for different categories.
What’s next for Burrow? Kuhl said the company “has just scratched the surface on new products” and market share.
“There’s so much room to grow; our penetration is low right now. We just keep refining and getting better,” he said.
