Direct-to-consumer furniture retailer CouchHaus has launched its first-ever store in Vancouver at Granville and Broadway.
The showroom is located at 2421 Granville Street.
Harrison Gordon and Paige Sandher, Co-Founders, were a couple in the search for a perfect couch a few years ago which led to the creation of CouchHaus.
The company was founded March 2021.
“CouchHaus is a direct-to-consumer furniture company, so we specialize in modular furniture and our main focus is on customization. We can offer hundreds of different fabrics and also made to measure. If you have a certain space that only allows for a certain size, maybe it’s only 110 inches, we can tailor it to your space and custom make it there. And a lot of companies usually charge an arm and a leg to upgrade whereas we offer all these changes for free,” said Gordon.
The furniture is made overseas in Shanghai.
“We were just looking for furniture for ourselves. We’re not only co-founders, but we’re also partners. We were moving into a new home and Harrison’s quite tall and I’m quite short. We’ve got a six-four and a five-two over here. He wanted a deeper seating couch but a lot of the deeper seats weren’t fitting into our townhome,” said Sandher.
“We didn’t have like the length of a full detached home that traditionally deeper couches are made for . . . When we looked at all the custom options after purchasing our first home we realized that custom furniture can go up to like $10,000 to $15,000 and we just weren’t in a space that we were able to spend that much. We thought, how could we do this in a more cost effective manner?”
Gordon said it was a running joke that they started selling a couch out of their house.
The retailer has been primarily online as an e-commerce brand. But they had so many people just within the Lower Mainland that wanted to come and visit and test out the couches that they started just inviting people over to their home for appointments.
“For the past three years, we’ve run it out of our house and we’ve had people come over and we do one-on-one consultations and personalize appointments,” he said.
“And just now, in the past month, we’ve signed a lease on a space in Vancouver. So we’re opening a flagship location on South Granville, which is where basically all the good furniture stores are in Vancouver. That’s going to be our first step to just being open to the public and not just by appointment of people visiting our house.”
The physical space is about 1,600 square feet.
Sandher said the showroom will be set up very much similar to its appointment model where they basically have different areas where you go through different features.
“One is like your configuration area where you choose what size and what modules you need. The second area is the size area. How deep you want the seats? And then the third one is the fabric area. We will of course have like more condo setups and then more of our home setups as well,” she said.
“And then in the back area will also have our design consultation rooms. So that’s where we essentially offer like 30 to 40 minute appointments where we’ll help you go through your space and customize based on the size that you’re working with as well.”
Gordon said all of the custom pieces are delivered within eight to 10 weeks.
“We also have noted that we have some really popular SKUs that we do now keep in stock at all times as well,” said Sandher.
“Those are available for purchase on the website and delivery within about three to five days.
“The product itself was actually very simple. We actually have one product and it’s just called the comfy couch. It’s sold as separate modules, and what I mean by modules is you can do a corner piece and armless piece or an ottoman or a chaise. And from there you can configure it to if you want to make a three-seater, a two-seater, a six-seater U-shape.
“You can really build it as you want to. And then from there, that’s where you customize if you want to add storage to the ottomans or raise the backrest height and certain features that you wish to upgrade, as well as the comfort of the couch. You can also choose how soft and firm you want it to be.”
Gordon said about 70 per cent of the brand’s customers are from British Columbia and about 20 per cent are from Ontario and then the other 10 per cent are scattered around Canada.
He said the company has looked into Stackt Market in Toronto.
“It’s a low commitment, you can sign a three or six month term there and you just basically run the space and test it out. So we’re hoping Q3 we open a pop up there and then if it looks good then sign a lease out East,” added Gordon.
“I think one of the really cool features about our product is that we also do focus on sustainability. A couple of features integrated into the product itself would be that we actually have removable slipcovers. They’re all fully washable, which is a really key feature for a lot of our clients. With them also being removable you can change the color of your couch as well. That’s also something that our clients will do as their lifestyle changes whether they have young families or you know wanting to switch it up just based on the seasons,” said Sandher.
“And the cushions are also restuffable. It’s usually the first thing that goes on couches is the actual cushions start sagging. We wanted to make ours so that you could refill the foam and then also restuff the cushion to really minimize furniture that’s going into the landfills.
“And then for every couch we build, we also plant 100 trees. That’s already built into our initiative as well.”
