Urban Ladder Brand Guidelines: A 2012 Bengaluru Start-up, 35 Designs & Reliance Retail

A Bengaluru start-up that began online.

Urban Ladder is a furniture and home-décor retailer based in Bengaluru. English Wikipedia says it was founded in July 2012 by Ashish Goel, who had worked at McKinsey & Company and the comic publisher Amar Chitra Katha, and Rajiv Srivatsa, who had worked at Cognizant and Yahoo!. TechCrunch, writing in November 2020, dated the founding to early 2012, and the company’s own website says simply: “In 2012, we started Urban Ladder.”

It began as an online-only shop. The company says its catalogue at the start featured just 35 designs, and that photographs sent in by early customers showed the same table or chair being used very differently from one home to the next. Its website now groups its range into sofas and recliners, bedroom, dining and kitchen, mattresses, study and storage furniture, and lighting and décor, alongside furnishings.

The record shows a business that sold furniture through its website first and moved into physical retail later. For its first five years the brand existed only on screen, in product photographs and listings; the shop signs came later. English Wikipedia says the company delivers to more than 83 cities in India, a figure it does not date.

From website to flagship store.

English Wikipedia says Urban Ladder moved into offline retail in 2017, in an effort to become an omnichannel brand, and opened its first flagship store in Bangalore on 8 July 2017. By November 2020, TechCrunch reported, the company was operating a chain of physical retail stores in several Indian cities in addition to selling online. English Wikipedia gives a current footprint of about 50 stores across cities including Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai, but does not date the figure, so it is given here only as that encyclopaedia’s count.

Services grew around the furniture. According to English Wikipedia, Urban Ladder launched a design-consultation service in 2016, under the name Urban Interiors, and set up the Urban Ladder Design Network, which gives outside interior designers 3D models of its products to use in their own schemes, priority on stock and a commission when their clients choose Urban Ladder pieces. English Wikipedia counts more than 600 design firms in that network, without giving a date for the figure. The encyclopaedia also says the company has offered furniture-exchange schemes with partners such as Zefo and Quikr, has worked with Homelane as a distribution partner, and has sold through other marketplaces such as Amazon and Flipkart; its delivery service includes installation and an augmented-reality feature that lets shoppers see a product in their own room.

Its website today lists further lines of business beside the shop: Home Interiors, a section for business and bulk buyers, furniture repair services and an invitation to become a franchisee. Those are the company’s current offers as it presents them. Taken together, they turn a furniture shop into a wider home business, with the same name on a sofa, a repair visit and a commercial order.

Design and documentation.

This set of guides looks at Indian online retailers and specialty chains, from beauty and baby products to furniture, fashion and books. Most of them meet their customers first on a phone, so the material a design reader can study is the material the companies publish themselves: app screens, the artwork for seasonal sale campaigns, delivery boxes and mailers, and the interiors of the stores some of them have opened.

Several of these brands began online and later added shops. Nykaa, founded in Mumbai in 2012, opened its first store at Delhi airport in 2014, according to English Wikipedia; FirstCry, launched in Pune in 2010, opened its first store in Gujarat within months, a co-founder told Mint in 2024. Others in the set began with physical stores and added online sales later. Each guide notes which way a company grew, and when.

Platform names are described plainly. Many of these businesses trade under a short consumer name while a differently named company owns it: Nykaa is run by FSN E-Commerce Ventures and FirstCry by Brainbees Solutions. Where a brand sits inside a larger group, or was bought by one, the guide gives the owner and the date as the sources report them.

Each guide also draws on corporate pages and press reports on founders, owners and stock-market listings, with the dates those sources give. Store counts and other figures are given as of the date their source reports them. Colours and typefaces are an unofficial interpretation for design study; no logo, product photograph or app screen is reproduced.

Part of Reliance Retail since 2020.

The company changed hands in November 2020. In a filing to the stock exchange, TechCrunch reported on 14 November 2020, Reliance Retail said it had acquired a 96 per cent stake in Urban Ladder, and it retained an option to buy the remaining shares. TechCrunch presented the deal as part of a broader push by Reliance Retail into e-commerce, which the group had entered through JioMart, a joint venture with its sister company Jio Platforms; Reliance Retail said the investment would widen the range of consumer products it offered. TechRadar reported two days later that the buyer was Reliance Retail Ventures, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries, and that the stake came from Urban Ladder’s existing investors, including Sequoia Capital India, Kalaari Capital and Steadview Capital. TechRadar counted it as the fourth in a run of purchases that year, after Kannan Departmental Stores of Coimbatore, the online pharmacy Netmeds and the retail assets of the Future Group.

Under Reliance, Urban Ladder has been folded into a much larger retail network. In October 2023, ETRetail reported that Reliance Retail had extended Urban Ladder’s presence into its Smart Bazaar hypermarkets and into institutional, business-to-business sales. On an earnings call, Reliance Retail’s chief financial officer described Urban Ladder as now an omnichannel business, with the aim of giving customers more touch points, including experience centres where they can see and feel the products before ordering online or in store, according to the same report. Urban Ladder’s own website now names Reliance Retail Limited, in Mumbai, in its footer, while the brand keeps its own name, website and app.

The furniture, the stores and the design services still carry the Urban Ladder name, and the company still speaks in the first person on its website about starting in 2012 with a small catalogue. The tones used for this guide are our own choice.

For a design guide, Urban Ladder shows how a retailer that began as a website can keep its name after a takeover. Compare Pepperfry, the Mumbai furniture marketplace founded by two former eBay executives, and BigBasket, another Bengaluru online retailer. For this guide we use a deep teal, a teak brown and an oatmeal with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Urban Ladder’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.