The Furniture Rental Market Is Booming. Here’s What It’s Like Behind The Scenes

As the VP of merchandising at furniture rental startup Feather, Kendra Ovesen oversees the curation, design, development and strategic planning for the company’s growing collection of rental furniture. This positions Ovesen at the forefront of a new design-forward lifestyle movement, one that is favoring a simpler, more nomadic way of life, spurred on by a post-pandemic economy and an uptick in remote-friendly work culture.

Feather’s recent successes in North America point to this becoming a dominant way of life for most millennials. The company recently announced an expansion into five new markets in the Texas region, as well as a new line of outdoor furniture in partnership with brands like West Elm and Pottery Barn. We spoke with Ovesen about her role at the company, the importance of design and curation in furniture rental services, and what the future of interior design looks like from where she sits.

What do you love most about your role at Feather?

One thing I love about my role is the unique challenge of blending consumer needs with the requirements of our circular business model in order to create furniture that checks all the boxes. Many of our pieces are multipurpose, flexible and stylish for our customers, as well as modular, sustainable and easy to refurbish in alignment with our mission to keep furniture in homes and out of landfills.

How does the furniture curation process work inside Feather? You have a mixture of working your own, Feather-branded items, but you also work with big names like West Elm and Floyd. What are the benefits of this hybrid approach (versus, say, only creating your own, Feather-branded furniture)?

Part of my role at Feather involves negotiating partnerships with furniture companies who share our sustainability values—like our partnerships with Floyd, West Elm and Leesa—to offer their beautiful furniture through our rental model. It’s extremely important to us that every brand partnership we launch represents an absolute alignment of ethos— whether they share the same sustainability mission as us, a compatible design aesthetic, or fill a unique gap requested by Feather customers and provide more depth to our overall furniture assortment.

We also love to leverage our partnerships with other brands to make otherwise aspirational products—like West Elm furniture— accessible to the Feather customer. Between 80 to 90% of the products on our website are Feather brand, however we reserve an additional ten to 15% to explore new categories for our customers through partnerships.

One of my favorite things about Feather is the apartment packages, which range in style and function from minimalist to luxurious. What are the benefits for consumers, and do you have any statistics or stories to share about how popular the apartment packages have been?

It all started when we began receiving an influx of customer requests for guidance piecing together an empty apartment from scratch. For many customers, designing a completely empty space can be really intimidating! There’s often a sense of fear or uncertainty that comes with it: Will the pieces I select complement one another, or will they clash? Will the configuration I have in my head actually work out? Am I really going to use this piece, or will it just take up valuable space?

By curating our apartment packages, we wanted to help take the guesswork out of designing your home by providing the building blocks for a modern, chic and comfortable space. We also took into account a variety of aesthetics, living spaces, budgets and day-to-day furniture needs, so that any customer can find a package that speaks to them, no matter their lifestyle.

In all of our packages, we mixed in staple pieces with exciting pops of color and texture to bring a dash of personality and warmth to any space. Many customers are interested in creating a bolder or more maximalist aesthetic in their home, but without design experience, they may lack the confidence to move forward with bold pieces out of concern that the final product won’t gel. Our apartment packages help solve that problem, and allow customers to build their space around a package—easily adding or removing items where necessary.

We only recently started tracking customer use of our apartment packages, but overall there has been an overwhelmingly positive response. Customers love the ease-of-use and the design confidence they feel working with our packages, as well as the clear picture of price point they provide right off the bat.

Following your Instagram account, it’s incredible how many people are able to create instant, Instagram-worthy rooms and homes with Feather furniture. Why do you think it’s taken this long to have a service like this? I mean, who wouldn’t want to have a stylish, beautiful home that’s both functional and eco-conscious?

That’s a great question! Consumerism has long been driven by the need to own new things. We’re conditioned to believe that something only has value when it belongs to us. But in recent years, that’s translated into massive over-consumption on the part of consumers (many of us own far more items than we really need – or even want), as well as irresponsible over-production on the part of retailers (especially goods that aren’t designed to last).

This massive over-consumption is apparent across every industry, but it’s really begun to rear its ugly head in the furniture industry, where “fast furniture” has increasingly become the norm. Thankfully, our values as a society are changing. We’re far more aware of our environmental footprint than ever before, which has led many to rethink rental furniture as a more sustainable option. Plus, being eco-conscious doesn’t mean sacrificing style or quality. Not only can you get beautiful furniture and home decor from Feather—you also get freedom, flexibility and peace of mind along with it.

We’re currently hosting the Feather Your Nest sweepstakes on our social channels, which offers an opportunity for Feather customers to show off the way they style Feather furniture and decor in their home for a chance to win prizes. We love to draw inspiration from these customer photos through programs like Feather Your Nest to inform our design direction, as well as inspire other Feather customers through our social media.

When designing and creating the Feather-branded items in the collection, where do you find inspiration? How do you create a complimentary, wholesome design?

When we developed our own line of Feather-branded furniture and home decor, we married a timeless and modern aesthetic with an economy of design that makes the pieces not only beautiful, but also highly functional. Whether that’s a coffee table that can transition into extra bench seating when guests are over, or nesting tables that can be easily stored when they’re not in use, we designed the whole line with small-space living and multi-functionality in mind.

Creating an environmentally responsible product was also extremely important to us when we designed our collection. We utilized sustainable materials including FSC certified wood, indigenous woods that are more abundantly available, as well as natural and water-based finishes.

We also designed our collection with refurbishment and long-term use in mind. Our fabrics are highly durable, and our furniture uses component parts so that any damage can be isolated and easily repaired.

But most importantly, our collections are continuously inspired by the needs and wants expressed by Feather customers, as well as the current home trends that are dominating the design industry. Before the pandemic, I spent a lot of time attending shopping markets domestically and overseas to observe home trends before they emerged, so that Feather customers always have access to the coolest, most cutting-edge products. Nowadays, we base new products and product extensions off off inspiration gleaned from the real-world spaces we observe in customer images and feedback.

Did the psychological aspects of choice paralysis come into play when you were designing and thinking about how many items from each category you should offer to consumers? We all know that we want a little bit of choice, but it’s very easy to go the other way and offer too much choice. How did you strike that balance?

Absolutely. Shopping for furniture and home decor online should be a fun experience, but far too often we find ourselves scrolling endlessly through page after page of search results. When we put together our collection, we wanted to make it easy for customers to fill the blank canvas of their home while still enabling them to make it their own. During the development process, we often struggle with having too many beautiful ideas to choose from! With Feather furniture and home decor, customers get the staple functionality that they need along with pops of personality and luxury that make it theirs.

How & when are the Feather pieces updated? For example, are you planning to update according to new trends/styles or seasonal changes?

Even though we are a non-traditional retailer, we are always looking at ways to update our line and add in new offerings based on the needs and wants of our customers. Feather furniture is designed for flexibility and changing trends, which makes it easy to add new splashes of color and personality to existing products with additional fabric options, or hardware, or adding new art and rugs to our lineup. We actually just recently introduced fun new patterns and prints into our furniture lineup, including the Langley modular sectional, blush-colored sectional in a statement shibori tie-dye pattern; a series of dreamlike, expressionist art prints from Cédric Pierre-Bez; and the Carlo chair, a plush, mid-century seat in a dramatic olive color. We’ve also launched a new category with our brand partners West Elm & Pottery Barn.

Depending on feedback we’ve received about how our products are used, we sometimes offer extensions of our current products to fit larger spaces, like rugs that cover larger square footage and even a larger version of our Valencia sofa which has emerged as a top performer.