44 Shipping Couches with Kabeer Chopra, co-founder of Burrow

Burrow aspired to create a couch you’d expect from high-end competitors without breaking the bank. Their biggest challenge? Shipping furniture through commercial carriers in compact boxes, quickly and for free.

To make their couch manufacturable and shippable, they had to balance form and function, to meet specific technical benchmarks. They reversed engineered their modular couch to minimize weight and fine-tuned every aspect of their product and packaging to make assembly and unboxing functional for the customer.

On this episode, co-founder Kabeer Chopra talks about designing an oversized product for efficient shipping (30:40). He talks about reducing purchasing barriers through online product pages (21:08) and offline showroom partnerships (22:27). He also shares the hardships of scaling a product from prototype to mass manufacturing (7:32), and manufacturing internationally (34:00). Finally, Kabeer shares how Y Combinator taught him to focus on learnings instead of perfectionism (11:12), and how they’re innovating their packaging design as part of their product experience (39:06).

Links and images from this post are on the Lumi Blog.