Last month, Thijs Meijerink, founder of market insight company Furnilytics, explored market data starting with the Polish furniture industry. Now, we share an exclusive insight into the business and its plans.
Can you share a bit about the business?
Furnilytics is a young company for the furniture industry that strives to provide clarity on market insights so our clients can make data-driven decisions. The key is combing state-of-the-art data gathering and analytics with the technical understanding of the furniture industry.
Our aim is to contribute to the growth of our industry by providing the people a better awareness of market trends. For this reason, we share weekly analytics, so we open the industry to free data-driven insights.
More about you?
I started my international journey during my wood technology studies. I completed a major part of the studies in Sweden and Germany. After that, I spent my first seven years in quality and development on the factory floor, where I started to use coding to do statistical analysis. I was then invited to start working in Sweden in product development.
It was there I quickly built my competence towards data mining and advanced analytics, which I used in business steering of purchasing. The red thread through it all has been finding creative methods to get insights to support business decisions, which led me to where I am today.
What are the key benefits of Furnilytics?
There are four key benefits. First of all, and the most important, we focus on customer specific topics. Our main product is custom analytics, which give a competitive edge. Secondly, Furnilytics is data-led, meaning that we can find more in-depth data. Let’s take the example of financial situation of our industry; obtaining, structuring and analysing thousands of financial statements would take ages, while using coding and AI-agents reduces this task to one day. This simplification significantly reduces the costs of doing such analysis, too.
Following that, we don’t want the insights to just be a piece of paper. We want them to be available to be used for decision making internally, therefore we share it via an API. This means that the data can directly be reused in Power BI or Tableau, at the customers internal platforms. The last benefit is relatively plain; we are transparent about our methodologies. We believe that an insight is only trustworthy if the method and its limitations are visible.
Why did you decide to launch the business?
I started the business as I was frustrated with the limited options we have to get information. There are several large companies that are not specialised in furniture who give very generic, inaccurate and expensive market analytics. The second option are a few specialised companies, that give better insights but are still expensive, lack transparency, do not share data and lack data integration. Besides this, the options modern techniques offer, such as large-scale pricing analysis, are often not utilised.
What plans do you have for 2026?
First of all, we will continue to share analytics on a weekly basis. Besides that, we have a few development plans. One includes to focus on material and retail pricing, setting up large-scale price tracking. We also want to do some deep dives in the major international furniture producing countries.
What is the process to work with you?
The easiest way is to send us an email. Open dialogues bring the effectiveness and relevance to our analytics. Of course, discussing ideas or opportunities is always free of charge. Once we define the wished analytics, Furnilytics will explore the technical possibilities (e.g. is the data available, can we automatise it?). This generally takes a week. After this step we will discuss the agreement.
A second option is to not use custom analytics but our standard data sharing agreement, then you can still get all data via an API. The description of the datasets is described on our website as well.
