Italian Home Design Startup Lovethesign Pulls In $4 Million Series A

They say that the only thing guaranteed in life is death and taxes. But perhaps we should add VCs piling money into furniture and homewear e-commerce startups to the list, not least in Europe. Today it’s the turn of Italian home design startup Lovethesign.

The company has raised just over $4 million in Series A funding, led by United Ventures, in addition to participation from a number of unnamed private investors from the Italian fashion and design industry.

Noteworthy is that Lovethesign plans to use the capital not only to bed down in Europe but also for a subsequent U.S. launch. Along with design-oriented startups, such as Madeindesign, and monoqi, the company also counts more general furniture e-commerce players, including Boston-headquartered and publicly listed Wayfair, as competitors.

Founded in late 2012 by Simone Panfilo, Laura Angius, and Vincenzo Cannata, all three of whom held management positions at e-commerce giant Privalia, Lovethesign sells “Italian style” furniture and other homewear, both in the form of a permanent selection and via weekly flash sales.

It says this includes 15,000 products in its store’s catalogue, while the startup has partnerships with over 1,000 designer brands including: Flos, Alessi, Artemide, MdfItalia, Foscarini, Casamania, Magis, Seletti Wears Toiletpaper. Meanwhile, it claims over 1 million customers and to have shipped 60,000 products to date, growing 20 per cent month-on-month.

“There was a real gap between Italian design producers and a global audience wanting to shop for original italian home designs,” Lovethesign CEO and co-founder Simone Panfilo says when asked to define the problem the startup has set out to solve.

“We give the opportunity to highly curated italian design producers to reach a global audience and sell their products everywhere and at the same time we give the opportunity to customers to shop among 10,000 design products.”