With 18 years of expertise in home interior solutions, retail, and manufacturing, Swati has driven the launch and expansion of a D2C modular furniture brand. Her strengths lie in operations, customer experience, process design, and strategy, with a focus on simplifying processes and fostering collaborative, innovative environments.
In a conversation with Women Entrepreneurs Review Magazine, Swati discusses the current landscape influencing product and service scalability, highlighting market shifts and emerging consumer preferences. She talks about balancing creative vision with practical implementation, using frameworks to align creativity with strategic goals, and the role of technology in offering customized, scalable design solutions.
Given the evolving trends in the design and interior services market, how do you perceive the current landscape impacting product and service scalability? Are there specific market shifts or emerging consumer preferences that are reshaping the way products are developed and scaled?
With the emergence of branded organized players in the home interior market, the expectations of the customers have clearly shifted towards a great customer experience without compromising on design and quality. Earlier, residential design was largely split between design firms who focused on customer centric design while the execution was handled by contractors who further outsourced each part of execution to their sub teams. Now with the promise of industry, customers have come to accept and expect a seamless experience through design and execution including after sales. In a service industry like that of home interior solutions, the dependency on people is very high and this is a challenge that the companies have to constantly negotiate with. Home interiors is largely a one time buy and it’s only fair when customers expect a wow experience. While there are increasing number of tech tools available that can better the experience, the customers’ engagement with the individual stake holder through the journey remains very crucial for the success of each project.
As you navigate the challenge of scaling design services in an increasingly digital and interconnected world, what innovative strategies or technologies have proven effective in adapting to rapid changes in consumer demands and preferences?
Imagine this – if the pizza you ordered, is delivered not by a quickcom enabled, rain drenched delivery executive but by a drone – would your experience be great? Indeed it would be. However if the actual pizza that you ordered tasted bad, the drone delivery would not make up for the bad pizza. That is the relationship between digital tools and services that are dependent on people. There are several tools that make the design and delivery process a lot more efficient than it was earlier, however the team on the ground still needs to deliver to their best. Every individual along the customer journey needs to meet the customer expectations. There are several tools that can wow the customer aiding isualization, interactive interface to showcase details of all interior fit outs, lights, materials. Investing in tools and processes for the sales and design teams are as important since these are critical in elevating in the personal experience for the customers.
How do you balance creative vision with practical implementation when leading a product team? What frameworks or methodologies do you use to ensure that your team’s creativity aligns with strategic business goals?
It is essential to understand that product teams need to be strategic in nature as well as hands on to be able to balance creativity with business impact. Successful product teams are the ones that are geared up to understand and analyse the problems or areas of improvement for the business and solve these through strategic thinking. To achieve this, the most critical aspect for the team is to understand the ‘why’. Why are we launching this? For whom / what are we looking to solve? It helps to break down the why and understand what business goals is one aiming to achieve. If there is a need for the product / service and is driven by demand, then it’s likely to generate more revenue. It could also be a brand differentiator vs competition. Much like we test drive cars across several companies and segments before choosing the car to buy, home interiors are also driven by customers shopping across brands and then choosing one over the other and in such cases being able to differentiate your brand offering over others becomes critical. It might or might not impact sales directly but could enable customers to choose your brand vs other brands. Hence the product team needs to know the ask and meet the business needs by strategically choosing the right product framework. Once the why is clear, an effort vs impact analysis is critical to analyse what would be the smartest and most impactful solutions to pick and execute. This way the team can pick solutions that have the most potential and work through the easier ones quickly, understand the impact and move on to the long tail ones that require longer execution.
In the realm of interior design and home services, how do you strike a balance between offering highly customized solutions and maintaining scalable, standardized processes? What role does technology play in achieving this equilibrium?
As much as companies need to build a certain standardisation and framework within which they can operate at scale, in a service led product, there are several components that the customer needs to complete their home interiors. We are not even talking about the additional furniture, upholstery, art and decor that customers choose themselves and like to add their personal touch to, but across fitted furniture, site work and renovation there are several pieces that fall under the purview of a home interior solutions service provider. And for these buckets of services the customer prefers to choose a service provider that can offer all services under one roof. The trick in balancing standardisation for scale and customization for the customers is that within the realm of the one stop solution, the customer should not be denied a service as long as it is possible to be accommodated within the company’s framework. Hence one needs to build a part of the process that is agile and can accommodate certain customer needs on the go. Surely there will be products and services that one company cannot literally provide for all universe, but imagine a small set of products / processes that are elastic and these provide for that little bit of additional service. It is important to build a framework for standardisation and scale along with a constant check on what additional products / services the customers are looking for. If you have to deny a large number of customers, then you are not catering to the target segment.
When scaling design services, how do you approach the challenge of balancing global expansion with local market needs? What factors influence your strategy for adapting products and services to different regional markets?
Understanding regional differences is an integral part of the design industry. Regional variations show up in cultural differences in lifestyle, family sizes, sizes of homes and all of these factors need to be considered when entering a new market. Within India one finds these differences, sometimes obvious and sometimes not so obvious due to what is sold in the local markets. Understanding regional differences and the micro markets is critical to a brand’s success.
In interior solutions, one region that has more compact homes, needs more functional units in less space - compact sizes and multifunctional storage spaces. Another aspect that changes is in the choice of colour palettes and finishes. While one cannot arrive at the most common colour palettes for a region since this is a very personal decision, there are still some nuances that the brands need to be aware of - a region / city would prefer warm woods, more natural earthy textures and finishes while another would lean towards more glossy finishes and solid colours. As a product team, one needs to ensure all of these choices are offered across the various design preferences. Your product offering needs to be complete in all aspects hence you would offer key selections across solids, textures, wooden and glossy finishes. A third key variable would be the family lifestyle and patterns that would determine the kind of spaces they need. A more open kitchen living dining for a family that spends more time at school / work but gets together with friends and family once in a while vs a home with dedicated spaces for living, dining, study etc for each to get their own space.
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