Aneeqa Khan (29) former strategy director at Zoopla and Guy Hands youngest hire at just 21, has turned her hand to modernising the way interiors professionals do business. A simple flat redesign was behind the launch of eporta in 2015 which has more than 2,000 interiors professionals and 800 suppliers from all over the world.
A completely new eco-system and solution for a fragmented global industry, since launch, eporta has become the largest brand network in global interiors. It simplifies the buying process so that endless google searching to find the magic supplier no longer exists.
Whilst searching for furniture for her Brixton flat and holding down a busy job, Aneeqa was unable to find pieces online simply and easily. She was surprised that despite the huge numbers of suppliers there wasn’t a website that made these accessible and in one place. Digging deeper, it became clear that the real issue was that professional buyers needed an online platform to aggregate the best global suppliers – both large and small to help them discover and order products.
“We wanted to create a design meritocracy where a professional can find the perfect item for their project whether that’s from an established brand such as Tom Dixon or a new talent that is unknown and doesn’t have a website.”
Buyers who range from property developers, architects, interior designers and trade buyers for the commercial market such as restauranteurs or hoteliers are able to create wish lists of products and negotiate trade discounts direct.
The site is deliberately style-agnostic and uncurated encompassing everything from Art Deco to mid-century modern and classic traditional. eporta meets every brand on the site so a certain quality threshold is guaranteed.
eporta is the digital partner of several trade events during The London Design Festival following its recent digital partnership at Clerkenwell Design Week which allowed visitors to track and contact brands pre and post show.
eporta backers include Robin Klein, Guy Hands, Ed Wray (Betfair founder), Rohan Blacker (Sofa.com founder) and Will Cooper (Achica co-founder).
Its quarterly trend reports show what the interior trade is buying. The data provides the most popular products sold and searched for amongst the global customer base and highlights the smaller niche British brands that are in high demand. The results proves interior designers and trade buyers are above all, looking for quality and originality with colour and pattern featuring heavily – part of the edit that a design professional will bring to a project to create a personal story with the well known brands pitched alongside the unknown.
“The product popularity shows a meritocracy in design as our most popular products often come from new designers who are in fact, very small businesses. Sourcing is a big issue for the interior trade community as it moves away from cookie-cutter interiors with clients demanding spaces that reflect personal style. The interior trade use eporta to source established brands alongside those that are hard to find.”
Some of the most popular British brands on the site from Jan – April 2016 are:-
-A Rum Fellow
-Boeme Design
-Content by Terence Conran
-Decode London
-Innermost
For a copy of the quarterly eporta interior trade trend report please email: melissa@byrnecomms.com.