Chairish launches new app to find used home furnishings
There are places on the Internet to buy and sell used furniture, including online newspaper classifieds, eBay and Craigslist. From a discriminating buyer's standpoint, however, they can be somewhat unwieldy to use, the prospects are hit-or-miss, and there's no room for remorse. On the other side of the equation, sellers of higher-end pieces have to hope that buyers will be willing to wade through endless listings to find their midcentury gems.
Last year, Chairish ("Buy. Sell. Adore.") decided to fill what it saw as a void by building a curated marketplace for high-quality used home furnishings. This year, it launched an app.
Sellers fill out a form, take a photo of their object and send it in. If the item passes muster with the Chairish team, it will be posted. There is a search function as well as an option to browse by category. Items can be sorted by price, color and amount of time they have spent on the site. Online, you can also sort by location, style and maker.
Sellers are encouraged to set their pricing at 20 to 30 percent below market value; the company takes 20 percent of the proceeds. Buyers have the choice of picking up the piece or having it shipped, which can be pricey. If an item that has been shipped doesn't meet their expectations, there is a two-day window for returning the item (though the buyer has to pay the cost).
The company was founded by Gregg Brockaway (who also co-founded, then sold both TripIt and Hotwire) and his wife, Anna, after they had difficulty selling their used home furnishings. (Other good sources for high-quality used furnishings are Krrb and One Kings Lane.)
Not surprising for a company with such an impressive tech pedigree, Chairish's website and app are both clean and easy to navigate. One especially fun pastime it offers is to look through the "curator's picks."
The experience isn't perfect. A search for bookcase one day turned up 78 items, 21 of which were not bookcases (including bookends, curios and a vintage camera). I came across a couple of embarrassingly bad spellings for a site focused on quality ("rought iron" and "koy fish"). There seems to be no way to save a search or to receive alerts. And I really wish more of the sellers were the people the site was supposedly invented for, rather than businesses.
That said, it took me far longer to write this review than it should have because I spent so much time browsing Chairish - and I'll be happy to keep looking for that perfect bookcase.
STATS
Cost: Free
Operating system: iOS
User rating: 4 1/2 out of 5 stars; Apple (45 ratings)
Bottom line: Chairish is a browse-worthy place to dream.