Pepperfry to allocate 10-12% of its marketing budget to influencers in 2026

For decades in India, buying furniture was a physical ritual. From browsing local showrooms to feeling the grain of wood and cushioning of a sofa with one’s hands, furniture shopping meant touching, trying, and talking in person before buying. It was a cultural default, rooted in centuries of traditional retail and reinforced by the sheer weight and long lifecycles of home furnishings.

Yet today, the way Indians discover, consider, and finally buy furniture has changed drastically. 

Furniture is now as much a digital discovery journey as it is an offline decision, especially when it comes to middle-class India’s growing comfort with online brands. Pepperfry, the Mumbai-founded home and furniture platform, has made a place for itself in the middle of this transformation.

Once an online novelty, the company today reports that nearly two lakh people visit Pepperfry’s platform every single day, roughly 20% of India’s daily furniture-buying audience, to start their discovery journey online before they see or touch products offline, if at all. That shift in consumer behaviour is now shaping the future of the category, says Kulbhushan Atkar, Head of Marketing and Furniture Category, Pepperfry.

Building trust before selling taste

“When we started Pepperfry back in 2011, furniture as an online purchase category didn’t really exist,” says Atkar. “At that point, the biggest task was building trust — answering a very basic question: why should I buy furniture online?”

That question shaped Pepperfry’s earliest marketing efforts. Unlike fashion or electronics, where e-commerce adoption was already underway, furniture required a far more foundational narrative. “That trust-building exercise was critical, and we focused on it for almost a decade,” Atkar says. “In fact, for the online segment, furniture as a category has largely been created by Pepperfry.”

Pepperfry’s early campaigns were not about aspiration or aesthetics. They were about reassurance.

One of the brand’s first large-scale campaigns, ‘Happy Furniture to You’, launched in 2014, focused squarely on service guarantees: free delivery, free installation, easy returns and customer support. The storytelling was simple and functional, designed to remove fear from the purchase rather than elevate design sensibility.

Pepperfry’s role in that transition has been significant. “Earlier, we were pushing only the discovery stage,” Atkar explains. “We had to get people comfortable with the idea that furniture could be discovered online at all.”

Over time, consumer behaviour evolved, and so did Pepperfry’s storytelling.

“What we’re seeing now is that for high-value purchases, customers want to touch and feel the product,” Atkar says. “They want to know how comfortable a sofa is, and what the material feels like.”

This insight did not replace the role of digital; instead, it redefined it. Online platforms became the starting point, not the end point, of the furniture-buying journey.

As the category matured and trust became a given rather than a hurdle, Pepperfry’s storytelling began to shift from permission to behaviour. The brand no longer needed to convince consumers whether they should buy furniture online, but how and when they should do it.

This thinking came through clearly in its recent festive campaign, ‘Why Wait for Diwali’, which deliberately challenged the cultural habit of last-minute festive shopping. Instead of romanticising the Diwali rush, the campaign used relatable, lightly humorous scenarios to highlight the stress, stock shortages and poor decision-making that come with procrastination. By urging consumers to shop early, Pepperfry repositioned itself not just as a furniture marketplace, but as a problem-solver that understands real consumer anxieties. 

Storytelling here was less about aspiration and more about easing friction, a natural progression for a brand that has spent years first building trust, then shaping behaviour within the category.

“The first stage is still discovery, which happens online,” Atkar says. “You can’t display thousands of catalogues in a 2,000-square-foot store, but you can online. Now, post-discovery, conversion becomes important, and that’s where stores play a crucial role by offering touch, feel and experience.”

This philosophy highlights Pepperfry’s current marketing narrative: discover online, shop offline. “I wouldn’t call it a shift,” Atkar adds. “It’s more of a progression. Our marketing today corroborates the earlier idea. That bridge has always been there.”

Social Media: The new entry point

For Pepperfry, today, discovery increasingly begins on social platforms.

“A large part of discovery today happens on social media,” says Atkar. 
This behaviour is shaping ad spends as well. “Until last year, most of our marketing spend was focused on mid and lower funnel, intent and conversion,  largely through Google and Meta,” Atkar says. “This year, we’re seeing a clear need to invest more in brand and discovery.”

Atkar points “From a budget standpoint, we’ve started shifting around 10-12% of our overall marketing spend towards influencer marketing.” These creators are playing a role across launches, store openings and category storytelling.

For Pepperfry, influencers are used less as brand ambassadors and more as a way to bring the catalogue to life. The brand partners with creators to show how its furniture actually fits into everyday homes, through room styling, unboxings, home makeovers and walkthroughs of both its website and physical stores. 

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This kind of content helps answer the practical questions consumers often have: how big a sofa really looks in a living room, how a bed feels once it’s set up, or what the delivery and installation experience is like. By letting creators showcase the entire journey, from selecting a product to seeing it in place, Pepperfry makes furniture shopping feel more familiar and less intimidating, helping people envision how the pieces could work in their own spaces.

Metros, Tier II and the service gap

While aspirations are converging across India, Atkar notes that expectations differ sharply between metro and non-metro consumers.

“From an aspiration standpoint, Tier II customers are rapidly catching up with Tier I,” he says. “They’re exposed to the same content through Instagram. If someone in South Bombay has a certain kind of sofa, a customer sitting in Nagpur wants the same thing.”

The difference lies in tolerance. “Tier I customers are slightly more forgiving if something goes wrong,” Atkar explains. “Tier II customers are more impatient and less forgiving. They expect the first delivery itself to be perfect.”

This makes post-sales experience a critical brand lever, especially as Pepperfry expands its offline studio network into smaller towns.

AI, premiumisation and the next phase

Even as technology reshapes how consumers discover and browse furniture, Pepperfry’s next phase of growth is anchored as much in physical expansion as in digital intelligence.

“AI plays a role across the entire journey, pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase,” says Atkar. From personalised product discovery based on browsing behaviour to post-order updates and campaign optimisation, AI now underpins how Pepperfry manages scale without overwhelming the consumer. “With such a large catalogue, we don’t want to flood customers with choices. AI helps us curate listings that are more personality-driven and relevant.”

But technology alone is not enough in a category that still values touch and experience. One of Pepperfry’s biggest growth levers going forward is offline studio expansion.

“The first big focus for us is studios,” Atkar says. “We plan to add at least 65 new studios this year. Currently, we have around 30 studios, and we’ll be expanding largely in metro cities.” Mumbai remains a key market. “In Mumbai alone, we already have nine stores, and we plan to open four more.”

While metros will anchor this expansion, Pepperfry is also looking beyond large cities. “We’ll also be opening around 40 stores in smaller towns,” Atkar adds, reinforcing the brand’s belief that aspiration is no longer limited to India’s top urban centres.

Alongside physical expansion, Pepperfry is also widening its product lens, especially at the premium end of the market.

“Pepperfry has always been a mass-prestige brand catering to India’s middle class,” Atkar says. “We democratised solid wood furniture in the country.” That positioning, however, is evolving as consumer tastes mature. “There is now a growing demand for premium categories like marble-top tables and leather sofas.”

To address this shift, Pepperfry is expanding its private-label portfolio. “We already have six private-label brands across furniture and mattresses,” Atkar says. “We will add two more this year to expand our offering and cater to higher-premium customers.” The move reflects a broader insight Pepperfry is seeing across data and demand: customers are becoming less discount-driven and more design-led.

The third, and relatively new, growth pillar is B2B.

“We’ve never actively played in this space, but we understand it deeply,” Atkar explains. “When you walk into a small hotel, café or restaurant today, you often see furniture similar to what we sell.” Pepperfry now wants to formalise that opportunity. “We want to play a larger role in furnishing office spaces, restaurants, cafés and small hotels.”

Taken together, these three levers, studios, premium supply and B2B, define Pepperfry’s next phase, supported by a marketing strategy that is no longer singularly performance-driven.

“So far, our focus has largely been on mid and lower funnel performance marketing,” Atkar says. “Going forward, we’re moving towards a three-legged approach: brand marketing, performance marketing and offline marketing.”

In a category that once relied almost entirely on physical presence, Pepperfry’s journey now reflects a more layered reality: one where AI shapes discovery, stores close the loop, and furniture is no longer just bought for function, but for identity, experience and expression.