bengaluru online furniture retailer urban ladder expects to break even on an operational basis when its revenue reaches 200 million which may happen by the middle of next year once we get to a 150200million net revenue range by middle of next year we will focus on getting our contribution margin to the 25 zone said ashish goel ceo of urban ladder contribution margin is the selling price per unit minus the variable cost per unit goel said that contribution margin has to be at least 10 percentage points over marketing costs for most ecommerce businesses to make money or drive profitability for the first 18 months of our business our contribution margins were over our marketing since we have been pressing on growth recently so our marketing spend has increased but we have that differential under control said goel the move comes as indian startups have sharpened their focus on unit economics after growing rapidly over the past two years the bengalurubased company hopes its revenues will grow fivefold in the current fiscal over that in the previous year we expected growth of six times however sometime midyear we decided to slow down for two months and focus deeper on the customer experience we pulled back on marketing pushed back on category launch focused on certain top categories operational efficiencies and redefine architecture said goel if the company had not done so it would have seen some erosion in customer satisfaction he said launched in 2012 urban ladder provides online furniture via an inventorybased and controlled supply model it competes with pepperfry and fabfurnish along with online marketplaces such as snapdeal and flipkart in its latest round of funding the company raised 50 million from investors led by sequoia capital tr capital steadview capital saif partners and kalaari capital pepperfry had in july raised 100 million from goldman sachs zodius technology fund and existing investors bertelsmann india investments and norwest venture partners although only a small proportion of home goods are purchased online investors are expecting things will change as more people who have grown up shopping online hit the age where they buy homes and need to furnish them by aditi shrivastava madhav chanchani et bureau published on dec 29 2015 at 0806 am ist telegram facebook copy link be the first one to comment comment now comments comment now read comment 1 all comments post post find this comment offensive choose your reason below and click on the submit button this will alert our moderators to take actions reasons for reporting foul language defamatory inciting hatred against a certain community out of context spam others report join the community of 2m industry professionals subscribe to our newsletter to get latest insights analysis download etretail app get realtime updates save your favourite articles scan to download app online goldman sachs furniture flipkart snapdeal ashish goel urban ladder homenewsonline furniture retalier urban ladder expects 200 million in revenue by mid next year