After moving house, in a bid to avoid flat-pack furniture Sandrine Zhang Ferron spent her weekends looking around vintage shops and second-hand dealerships for a yellow armchair to match her cat’s eyes.
“What started as a fun activity became a chore and I thought, surely there’s a better way to do this,” she says. That better way became Vinterior, the marketplace for vintage furniture Zhang Ferron set up in 2016 after leaving her job.
After raising an £8m Series A round in 2021, the company has just secured £3m in media for equity from 4 Ventures — the venture arm of British broadcaster Channel 4 — Companies House filings, confirmed by Vinterior, show. It’s also in talks to raise an additional £2m in equity, Zhang Ferron tells Sifted.
VCs have pulled back from consumer-focused startups in the last year, as interest rate rises have dampened consumer spending power. But Vinterior is part of a cohort of marketplace businesses which appear to have defied the wider downturn.
Others include Lithuanian unicorn Vinted, a marketplace for second-hand fashion, which turned a profit for the first time in 2023.
Zhang Ferron says Vinterior will be cash flow positive by Q4 this year and across the whole year in 2025.
Mid-century millennials
Vinterior’s online marketplace sells pre-owned and vintage furniture. The company’s known for selling trendy mid-century pieces — though Zhang Ferron insists they are style agnostic. A series of recent tube ads in London featured on-trend 1950s sideboards — alongside jabs at flat-pack giant IKEA: “No Swedish meatballs, No instructions, No divorce.”
Vinterior takes 24% commission from each sale – up from 15% when it started.
95% of Vinterior’s customers are in the UK, with more than half of them in London; half of the sellers are in continental Europe.“We are a gateway for them to get into the market, which is even more important since Brexit,” she says.
Getting on the telly
Growing a consumer brand often means a significant marketing spend. Zhang Ferron says the cost of acquiring one customer is paid off on average after their first order, and that 40% of its sales come from repeat customers.
Vinterior wants to expand its reach across the UK, beyond London — which is where media for equity from 4 Ventures, the VC arm of Channel 4 comes in.
“I think for millennial, digital savvy customers, Instagram is useful, but we also have a lot of customers in the 45-65 age group, which we believe we can reach better with TV,” says Zhang Ferron.
Vinterior will receive ad space worth £3m through the deal, and it can choose when it uses the adverts.
4 Ventures was set up in 2015 and has invested in consumer-focused companies including mapping tool What3Words, vegetable box provider Oddbox and online car marketplace CarWow.
As VCs have retreated from the consumer category, media for equity investors have taken on a more significant role, says Vinay Solanki, who founded and heads up 4 Ventures.
“We are specialist consumer investors, which is definitely a dying breed right now,” says Solanki — who recently bought a sideboard from Vinterior to display his record collection.
Solanki says TV ads can be a particularly fruitful marketing tool for higher ticket purchases. You’re more likely to drop a couple of hundred pounds on a new armchair if you’re sitting at home relaxing — rather than, in the case of ads on public transport, dashing for the next tube.
