Digit: Can you tell us about HomeLane?
Chandran: HomeLane was founded in 2014. The whole idea was when you are buying a house, it is a very frustrating experience, for you to get your interiors done. There is not enough education to the customer about what the various possibilities are, from a material and design standpoint. This is because it is done without technology to a major extent, your carpenter or decorator designs something, and there is not always a hundred percent match between what is being designed and what is being implemented. There is no defined timeline for when these things will get completed, and there is no warranty after that. So for most people, buying a house is a once in a lifetime event, and they are spending quite a bit, up to ten percent of their house’s value on the interiors. This process takes anywhere between two months up to six months. They are not treated with the level of dignity that they deserve, they are chucked around from one party to another, they have to coordinate with six different people, it is a very frustrating experience. This is what we want to solve.
Digit: Can you tell us about what actually goes on in the factory?
Chandran: We work on a process called design to manufacture. Once the designer designs the house with the customer, that is when we show what is possible for the customer. Then we follow it up with an actual measurement of the physical space because what you see in the floor plan is not exactly what is there when you go to the customer’s site, because of the carpet area. We do the actual measurements there, and we generate 2D and 3D drawings for this, which are fed directly to a machine, so the errors are reduced significantly.
Digit: You take individual measurements for the volume of customers?
Chandran: We do more than 3000 meetings a month. Everybody has their own floor plans, this is across 7 cities and different builders. Some could have similar floor plans, but we measure each one. We never reuse somebody else’s designs for a customer because we try to understand the customer’s needs and design it for that customer.
Digit: How much of your technology is developed in house?
Chandran: Anything that is in the direct path of the customer experience, like Spacecraft, our cataloguing system, our pricing system, these are all both in the path of the customer experience and are competitive differentiators for us. We develop all of this in house. The entire design to manufacturing part of it, most of it is developed in house, some of it we buy, which are all again commodities that we buy. We tend to only spend on those aspects that actually impact customer experience.
Digit: Can you tell us a bit more about Spacecraft?
Chandran: Nobody else in the industry actually has what we have. Our competition may claim other stuff. For me, when we are doing visualisation, it has to convey three messages. First and foremost, it has to show you the design, what is possible. It shouldn’t just be in terms of putting cabinets in the kitchen. It has to show you how your kitchen will look once you put in, let’s say, the fridge and everything else in there. With sunlight, without sunlight. In the evening with the lights turned on, is it too bright for me? You will be able to choose the colour palette right then and there, without having to do it on a live site where after the implementation, you will be like oh my god, this is too bright. We want to simulate as much of real life as possible in the design itself, so that you do not have a bad experience at the end of the whole thing. The second part is that I need to know what it costs me. You have to tell me a price for each one of those elements. We tell you what are the possibilities within your budget. The third part of it is, if I say it is a kitchen, what is possible in a kitchen? What is possible in a master bedroom? What is possible in the living room? How much budget am I given to spend across these rooms? I should be able to see my cost by room, look at the overall price that I am spending, and I should be able to get a quote at the end of it that tells me what are the various products that are being used, what are the materials being used, what are the offers that I am getting. This is what comes out as an output to the customer in the form of a quote. These are the three things that we want to convey.
Digit: What kind of interactions can users have with Spacecraft?
Chandran: They can move around in 3D, and say, open and close kitchen cabinets. We can put in actions onto the cabinet. We can put in a cutlery holder and add or remove lights.
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Aditya Madanapalle
Aditya Madanapalle, has studied journalism, multimedia technologies and ancient runes, used to make the covermount DVDs when they were still a thing, but now focuses on the science stories and features. View Full Profile
