Who Should Pepperfry Build For Next?
How Strategic Research Helped Uncover a Future Consumer Opportunity
The most consequential business decisions often begin with a question that an organisation has not yet fully articulated. For Pepperfry, that question was not simply how to strengthen its position in the furniture and home category. It was more fundamental: Who should Pepperfry build for next, and what would it take to understand that consumer before making decisions about the future of the business?
This question became the starting point for a research engagement that User Connect Consultancy (UCC) undertook in partnership with The Turtle Story for Pepperfry. Over a span of two months, we explored changing consumer aspirations, evolving relationships with homes, category dynamics and emerging opportunities across Indian markets. The objective was not to validate an existing hypothesis, but to develop a deeper understanding of the consumer and identify where the business could go next.
For Ashish Shah, co-founder & CEO of Pepperfry, and the leadership team, this meant being willing to revisit familiar assumptions about the category and the consumers the business had traditionally served.
At the heart of the brief were two connected questions: how did Indian consumers perceive Pepperfry, and who should the brand be building for next? Answering these required looking beyond the brand's existing customer base to understand how people's relationships with their homes were changing, what they aspired to, and where new consumer opportunities might lie.
At UCC, this is where we believe strategic research creates its greatest value: when it becomes part of defining the business question, rather than merely answering one that has already been decided.
We approached Pepperfry differently. We began with uncertainty and allowed the evidence to shape the questions as we went along. Instead of starting with a predefined consumer segment and looking for proof, we wanted to understand the larger shifts in people's lives, aspirations and relationship with their homes, and then examine what those shifts could mean for the future of the brand.
Two challenges shaped this inquiry. The first was a perception gap: understanding how consumers currently viewed Pepperfry and how that compared with the brand's ambition to represent a broader, lifestyle-led idea of the home.
The second was audience ambiguity: identifying which consumers represented the most meaningful opportunity for the brand and whether its existing product offering aligned with their needs, aspirations and ways of living.
Looking Beyond the Existing Customer
Understanding existing customers is important, but it does not necessarily reveal where a business should go next. Historical purchase data and established consumer profiles can explain current behaviour; they may not adequately capture emerging aspirations, unmet needs or consumers who represent a future growth opportunity.
We began by broadening the lens beyond Pepperfry's current customers. We wanted to understand how Indian homes were changing, what people increasingly expected from their living spaces, how aspirations varied across generations and markets, and how furniture and home-making fitted into people's lives.
This required examining consumers within the wider contexts that shaped their decisions. Family structures, economic circumstances, cultural influences, urbanisation, social aspirations and changing lifestyles all informed how people thought about their homes. We also examined category and market trends, the competitive landscape and the conversations people were having about home, furniture and identity.
Secondary research and social listening helped us place individual observations within these broader shifts. Competitive analysis helped us understand where established propositions were converging and where meaningful opportunities might exist. The intent was to build a holistic picture of the market before narrowing the inquiry to individual consumers. After all, understanding what people buy is only one part of understanding why they buy, what they aspire to and what they might need next.
Building the Research From the Ground Up
The research was designed as a layered study, with each stage informing the next. Over two months, we explored consumer behaviours, aspirations and relationships with their homes across Tier 1 cities—Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi—and Tier 2 cities—Chandigarh, Ahmedabad and Mysore.
This geographic spread allowed us to examine how consumer expectations and relationships with the home varied across different urban contexts, building a more comprehensive understanding of the consumer and the category.
We spent time inside people's homes through ethnographic immersions and visual documentation, observing not only what people owned but how they actually lived with their spaces. We looked at what they displayed and what they concealed, what they prioritised and what they compromised on, and how their homes reflected their aspirations, relationships and sense of identity.
These observations often revealed nuances that would have been difficult to capture through direct questioning. What people say they value and what their everyday choices reveal about them are not always the same, and the space between those two can be where the most valuable insight lies.
In-depth conversations allowed us to go further, exploring the beliefs, emotions and aspirations underneath functional purchase decisions. We wanted to understand what a 'good home' meant to different people, what contemporary living represented to them, when furniture became an expression of identity and where aspiration met the practical realities of budgets, family expectations and everyday life. Group conversations gave us another perspective by allowing us to observe how opinions evolved socially: what people agreed with, what they challenged, what they borrowed from each other and what they were reluctant to articulate individually.
We then used quantitative research to test emerging patterns at scale, ensuring that compelling qualitative observations were not mistaken for market-wide truths.
We also conducted competitive decoding to understand how other brands were positioning themselves and where the category was already crowded. Secondary research helped us ground our observations in broader market and cultural shifts, while social listening allowed us to hear conversations about homes, furniture and identity that were happening without a researcher in the room.
Each method gave us a different piece of the puzzle. The real insight came from triangulating those pieces and looking for patterns that remained meaningful across different forms of evidence.
From Observations to Strategic Consumer Archetypes
Collecting research data is only part of the work. The more demanding task is interpreting it responsibly and determining what it means for a business. The real insight came from triangulating those pieces and looking for patterns that remained meaningful across different forms of evidence.
As distinct consumer archetypes began to emerge, we did not immediately convert them into personas and treat them as the final output. We repeatedly challenged the emerging segments across behaviours, aspirations, market contexts, and business realities.
Were we seeing meaningful differences in how people lived and made decisions, or simply demographic variations?
Did an apparent consumer segment represent a significant opportunity or merely describe the market Pepperfry already served?
Was the opportunity likely to remain relevant as consumer expectations evolved?
And was it a space the business could credibly build around?
These questions mattered because a detailed persona is not necessarily a strategically valuable one. A segment can be interesting from a research perspective without representing a meaningful direction for a business.
We therefore moved continuously between human understanding and commercial relevance. Consumer aspirations had to be understood in their own right, but they also had to be considered alongside category dynamics, competitive opportunities and Pepperfry's strategic ambition.
Months of examining, testing and eliminating possibilities ultimately led to three distinct consumer archetypes. The significance of this outcome lay not simply in defining three groups of consumers, but in identifying the consumer opportunity Pepperfry could strategically build its future around.
That distinction changed the purpose of the research. We were no longer only describing who the consumer was. We were helping the business make a more informed decision about whom it should serve next.
When Leadership Steps Into the Field
One of the defining features of this engagement was the involvement of the Pepperfry and The Turtle Story teams throughout the research process. Rather than treating research as an activity that happened independently and culminated in a presentation, the teams engaged with the process, participated in fieldwork and worked through emerging findings.
As The Turtle Story reflected:
“Beyond the depth of the research, what stood out to us was the team’s willingness to sit in the discomfort of not having an answer yet. That’s rare, and it’s exactly what a rebrand of this scale needed.”— Kedar Naik, Founder-Director, The Turtle Story
Ashish Shah's willingness to revisit familiar assumptions and examine how the category and consumer were evolving helped establish the conditions for this inquiry. The leadership team's openness to evidence, including findings that could challenge existing beliefs, was important to the quality of the eventual direction.
When leaders encounter consumers directly, research takes on a different significance. An unexpected behaviour observed in someone's home, a contradiction between what someone says and what they do, or a conversation that challenges an established assumption can have a much greater impact than the same observation presented as a finding in a report.
The outcome is not simply a better-informed leadership team. It is a stronger connection between evidence, strategic intent and the decisions that follow.
From Consumer Understanding to Brand Opportunity
The work ultimately gave The Turtle Story and Pepperfry a much stronger foundation from which to think about the brand's future. The opportunity was no longer simply about how Pepperfry could sell furniture more effectively. It opened up a larger question about the role the brand could play in the lives of contemporary Indian consumers and in the way they think about their homes.
Pepperfry could move beyond being understood primarily as a furniture marketplace towards a broader, more lifestyle-led interpretation of contemporary Indian living. The creative transformation that followed was therefore not happening in isolation; it was grounded in a clearer understanding of the consumer opportunity and the cultural territory the brand could potentially occupy.
This is where the collaboration between research, business leadership and design becomes especially important. Research does not need to prescribe every subsequent decision. Its role is to make the opportunity clearer, establish a credible understanding of the people involved and give decision-makers a stronger basis for evaluating their choices.
The Turtle Story brought its understanding of the brand and its creative expertise to the subsequent work. UCC's role was to build the consumer and market understanding that informed the strategic direction. Together, the teams connected evidence about people's lives with the business's ambitions for the future.
The value of this approach is also reflected in how the client experienced the collaboration. As Kulbhushan Atkar, Chief Revenue Officer at Pepperfry, puts it: “This was never a cosmetic exercise. Moving from furniture to home needed clarity on who we serve and why they choose us. The qualitative research conducted by UCC, followed by positioning and identity by The Turtle Story, gave us that clarity, and a refreshed brand system that works across all our customer touchpoints.”
For us, the value of this collaboration lies in that connection: human understanding translated into a more informed strategic choice.
What the Pepperfry Project Reinforced About Strategic Research
The Pepperfry engagement reinforced an important principle that guides our work at UCC: the value of research is not measured by the volume of data collected, the number of interviews conducted or the sophistication of the final presentation. It is measured by the quality of the decisions it enables.
Strategic research requires researchers to move comfortably between different levels of understanding. We need to recognise the nuance of an individual's lived experience while also identifying patterns across consumers and markets. We need to remain attentive to what people say, what they do and the circumstances that shape both. And we need to connect these observations to the strategic questions a business must resolve.
This also demands intellectual discipline. Researchers must be prepared to challenge early interpretations, look for contradictory evidence and resist the temptation to turn every interesting observation into a definitive conclusion. The willingness to remain with uncertainty, rather than rushing towards a convenient answer, is often what allows a more meaningful opportunity to emerge.
An external research partner brings another important dimension: the ability to look at the business without being constrained by its established assumptions.
The responsibility is not simply to collect evidence or report findings, but to interpret what the evidence means, identify what deserves further scrutiny and help the organisation see possibilities it may not have considered.
For UCC, this is the essence of human-centred research at a strategic level. It brings empathy and evidence together, connecting an understanding of people with the decisions that shape products, businesses and markets.
Research That Helps Decide What Comes Next
The outcome of this project was not limited merely to submitting a research report, a set of segments or a collection of consumer quotes. Those were artefacts of the process. The larger outcome was a shift in the question the business was asking. Instead of asking how to speak more effectively to the consumer it already had, the organisation could begin thinking about whom it wanted to build for and what role it wanted to play in their lives.
That is also why this project remains particularly meaningful to us. It demonstrated what becomes possible when a client, a design partner and a research team are willing to stay with the complexity of the problem rather than rushing towards a convenient answer.
For UCC, that is ultimately the measure of good research: not how impressive the research deck looks, but whether it changes the quality of the decisions that follow.
A rebrand may ultimately be visible through a new identity, a new voice and a new expression in the market. But the deeper transformation begins much earlier. It begins with the willingness to listen closely enough to recognise that the future customer may not look exactly like the customer you have today, and with the discipline to understand what that means before deciding where the brand should go.
The Pepperfry transformation was a powerful example of that belief in action. Research was not sitting on the sidelines of the transformation, waiting to validate the creative direction. It was part of the process of discovering what the next direction could be.
Explore how The Turtle Story brought Pepperfry’s brand transformation to life, building on the consumer understanding uncovered through research.
The question of who to build for next is one that many businesses eventually face and the one which requires uncovering emerging needs, changing aspirations and opportunities that may not yet be visible.
At User Connect Consultancy, we help businesses navigate these questions through strategic consumer research, bringing together human understanding and market evidence to inform decisions about what comes next. If your business is exploring a similar question, we'd be happy to hear from you at shipra@userconnectconsultancy.com .
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