Furniture & home appliance subscription CLAS gains funding for expansion

Do you have excessive amounts of furniture and home appliances, many of which you don’t really need? Did you know that there is a service that rents out these items so that you can live a stress-free, sustainable life? CLAS is a subscription service for individuals and corporations that allows people to use and exchange furniture and home appliances. The Tokyo-based company is Japan’s first interior sharing service for private homes and companies. Their service enables people to use and exchange interior goods from merely 500 yen a month. The new sharing economy model suggests a fresh take on how we conceive furniture and home appliances.

Currently, lifestyles are rapidly changing due to transfers, job changes, marriage, and childbirth. Every time people encounter a new stage in their life, they are often required to change their living environment, including their furniture. However, disposing old furniture and buying new replacements requires a lot of time and money. CLAS thus launched a Product as a Service (PaaS) model for furniture and home appliances to address the issue. They took action to remove the burden off people who have to continuously purchase new furniture. Under their concept of a “free and light way of living,” CLAS rents out furniture with no shipping fee, deposit, or additional cost, so that users can shift their living environment easily and affordably.

Moreover, their interiors are made of high-quality materials with simple, sophisticated designs suitable for use in any type of home. With their unique service, CLAS offers people the interior they need, whenever they need it. It’s an interior shop that offers goods people don’t have to buy or own!

Just last month, CLAS celebrated its third anniversary. With more people working from home and office environments changing in the last couple of years, the company has managed to more than triple its growth annually. On this occasion, CLAS has raised a funding of approximately 2.1 billion yen acquired through a third-party allotment share with acceptance from Globis Capital Partners & Co. and Monoful Inc’s Group companies, etc. As a result, the total amount of funds procured has reached approximately 2.8 billion yen.

Having raised additional funding, the company hopes to strengthen its recruitment and organizational structure, hoping to hire 200 people by 2023. In addition, CLAS strives to expand its service area, handling a more extensive variety of products in a wider field. By doing so, they hope to grow as a subscription marketplace. Above all, by promoting a circular lifestyle where people no longer own products and instead borrow furniture and home appliances when they need them, returning them when they don’t. Through doing so, the company hopes to provide an ideal space that can respond to people’s changes in lifestyle while improving their quality of life.

More than anything else, CLAS hopes that through its service, the company can reduce the burden on the environment and contribute to realizing a more sustainable society. The returned furniture is repaired and cleaned by professional repair craftsmen, making it available for re-rental. The next user can comfortably use the product again, meaning they don’t have to discard used furniture, supporting this circular economy.

Who knows? In the future, furniture and home appliances might become things to borrow, not to buy.