Venture Everywhere Podcast: Ben Parsa with Jenny Fielding
Ben Parsa, co-founder and CEO of CABA Design chats with Jenny Fielding, Managing Partner of Everywhere Ventures
In episode 98 of Venture Everywhere, Jenny Fielding, co-founder and managing partner at Everywhere Ventures, sits down with Ben Parsa, founder and CEO of CABA Design, a next-generation home furniture company reinventing how modern consumers shop for and live with their furniture. They’re building sustainable, high quality furniture brands while giving customers unparalleled choice in design through customization and modularity. Ben shares how his early years building on-demand apparel production in China gave him insights that shaped CABA’s vertically integrated approach. He also discusses how CABA’s tech-enabled, full-stack operations allow the company to deliver high-quality sofas in days—not months — setting a new standard for speed, efficiency, and customer value in the furniture industry.
In this episode, you will hear:
Reinventing furniture through tech-enabled, vertically integrated operations
Delivering sofas from order to home in days, not months
Offering modular, customizable designs shaped by customer feedback
Scaling multiple home brands on a single operational platform
Reducing waste while improving quality, comfort, and value
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TRANSCRIPT
00:00:04 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.
00:00:14 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere Podcast. We’re a global community of founders and operators who’ve come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:34 Jenny: Welcome everyone to Venture Everywhere. Today we’re very excited to have CEO and founder Ben Parsa, founder of CABA and another company. He’s going to tell us a little bit about how he spends his time. You have such a long legacy of founding companies. My first question is, have you ever worked for anyone else?
00:00:53 Ben: My first business was in apparel. I did that straight out of college. Did that for a couple of years. Then I joined a company where I technically wasn’t a founder initially. I joined as the first hire outside of the founding team. And then I took on the co-founder title about a year in so technically worked for someone else. That’s correct.
00:01:11 Jenny: I love it. But you figured out how to be the co-founder. Also an interesting data point. Of those companies, maybe before you get to CABA, you can give us just a little flavor of what were maybe one or two inflection points during that, informed your journey now.
00:01:28 Ben: My background is industrial design. And weirdly I went into apparel. It was more so because I just found there’s an interesting opportunity here. I went to LA. I remember going to all the apparel mart buildings and meeting the folks that drive that industry as the sales reps and sort of the conduit in between.
00:01:45 Ben: Just my general takeaway was if you work hard, this is an interesting category. It’s a big category. There’s an opportunity here. And so that’s what made me decide to go into apparel.
00:01:56 Ben: And then the first business we really started, I went overseas. I booked a one-way ticket to China at the time. And so started doing very quick production runs, very quick sampling, like where the opportunities are in this segment. We can create samples and ship them out within a week. Extremely quick turnaround times.
00:02:13 Ben: If a big retailer would place a PO, we would produce that and we brought in-house the pattern making, the capability set around making samples and making small batches. And then we had tapped into a large extended workforce that worked for other facilities, but they would do contract work for us at home quickly and on the fly.
00:02:34 Ben: It was really like just-in-time manufacturing where we sort our own fabric. We had an extended workforce that wasn’t on our payroll. I think that actually informed a lot of what I did later in life, which is apply that to furniture and how do you build a supply chain that’s lower cost, faster pace, higher turns, all of that, which ultimately I think is critical to survival in the business.
00:02:54 Jenny: What was the year that you were doing on-demand apparel?
00:02:58 Ben: 2008, 2009.
00:03:00 Jenny: So that was even before we had a term for it. You guys were being savvy.
00:03:04 Ben: It was just understanding, we don’t have the capability to have the ownership. I went to Shanghai area. At the time, we had a tailor that used to work at a Zara facility and was like one of their head tailors. We paid him a good amount of money to come work directly for us.
00:03:19 Ben: The key thing was there were hundreds and thousands of seamstresses that were working there and he had hand selected maybe the top 50. They would do work at home outside of normal work hours.
00:03:31 Ben: And so we would cut and drop packets off in 50 locations with a van, have it all sewn up in 48 to 72 hours. Have it picked back up and then have it air freighted directly into whatever retailer was buying that product from us.
00:03:44 Ben: It was a low cost infrastructure, really high output. It was a lot of work, but it was a good couple of years for sure.
00:03:49 Jenny: That’s awesome. Aside from, obviously, being capital efficient in the way that you’re running that, what was your biggest learning from your time in China?
00:03:56 Ben: Yeah, it’s an amazing country. It’s complicated to navigate, huge opportunity but I think the cost of things. I think US consumers, and just anyone who buys anything in the US, doesn’t truly understand how low cost things can be made overseas and doesn’t understand what the drivers of those costs are.
00:04:16 Ben: A great example, you could make a pattern for, let’s say, a piece of apparel and a fabric roll is 148 inches wide. And if your pattern extends two inches past that, for whatever reason, you rotated it and your consumption went up by 40%, your waste went up by 40%.
00:04:32 Ben: And so I think one of the principles we had with CABA, ultimately, was we need to learn the true manufacturing process for the goods that we bring to market. We need to understand and do it ourselves. And we need to understand every variable of decision that drives costs.
00:04:50 Ben: So you could make a chair one inch bigger, but the material consumption and wastage could go up by 30% within that single inch. Those are the things that I think I learned early on. You only get it at a facility, at an OEM, at a factory, and you’re watching people work and you’re understanding and seeing, “Well, wait a minute, why is this being wasted?”
00:05:12 Ben: And then you understand there’s a lot of decisions that were made by a designer overseas that had zero understanding of that one extra inch and the impact that has on cost. That was a big takeaway for me.
00:05:23 Jenny: That’s cool. I was in China maybe two years after that. It was kind of as things were really opening up. And I mean, it was just such an amazing time to be there.
00:05:34 Ben: It’s considered the golden years for a lot of expats, 2010, 11, 12.
00:05:37 Jenny: So I was there. I worked for the BBC at the time. When I finally got to the country, I was just like, “This place is incredible.” And there are all these expats that had been there a few of years before that had really found their niches. And so one was opening Starbucks. It was like all these Americans.
00:05:52 Ben: My co-founder, Andy, was there before me. And he was already like the expat who’s fluent in Chinese. People are blown away at his level of language. But he did a bunch of work for Starbucks at the time actually. All their flagship stores he was designing.
00:06:06 Jenny: So let’s fast forward to CABA and what made you start this company. And I know there’ve been some twists and turns, so just talk us through CABA.
00:06:14 Ben: Prior to CABA, I’ll start there real quick. I joined a company called Dot & Bo. That was home furniture predominantly, Wayfair model, drop-ship. We had built an amazing consumer experience on the front end.
00:06:27 Ben: But when you’re beholden to a thousand drop-shippers doing their job and their OEMs and the quality and the lack of control that comes with that totality of supply chain, it ends up being a churn and burn business. It’s inevitable as Wayfair that you will disappoint a customer along the way.
00:06:45 Ben: It’s a very expensive customer to acquire. Once you disappoint them, they’re very hard to ever earn back to some extent. And so that’s an indicative problem in this category. And really it was, can you apply a design-centric model, do things in-house, be vertically integrated? And there’s a lack of innovation, I think, in the category, or has been for a long time.
00:07:06 Ben: People will bring a new silhouette, new fabric, but they’re not fundamentally looking at a piece of furniture and going, “Okay. We’ve been making this for a hundred years like this. How do you provide something that a consumer can sit on, is comfortable? How do you then throw everything that is currently in the rule book out and start from scratch? How would you do it today with production processes, material processes that we have access to that we may have not considered 30, 40, 50 years ago?”
00:07:34 Ben: And so that was really sort of what led to the category. It’s a huge category. It’s not a winner take all scenario. There’s plenty of opportunity in the category to speak.
00:07:43 Jenny: Also anyone who has bought a couch has a story.
00:07:47 Ben: Yeah. I don’t think you run into anyone who’s bought a couch who says, “That was the most amazing experience.”
00:07:52 Jenny: Every single person. I mean, you don’t buy them that often, but like everyone’s had experience. Oh, it took eight months to deliver. It was super expensive. It took three months and it wasn’t what I ordered. The fabric, it was so confusing, the sizing.
00:08:06 Ben: We give ourselves a really hard time, but we’re not too bad. Shipping in 74 hours. Not too bad.
00:08:12 Jenny: Talk a little bit about how you guys do it different. What were the things you had to change? Because there was a lot of usage change and behavioral change and obviously logistical things that you needed to do.
00:08:23 Ben: It’s been a bit of a journey, I would say. We started with this idea of mass customization and the intent and ideation round up was, first of all, let’s take an approach where we understand what consumers want within each category of furniture.
00:08:37 Ben: The only way to do that without biasing the results potentially is by saying, “Okay. We’re going to give you a million variations of a couch, you customize it, and then we see where demand actually fits and what do people want and why do they want it.”
00:08:51 Ben: And we added feature sets and we would toggle and turn on and off feature sets and really try to understand aesthetically, feature wise what people care about. That sort of started to guide our longer term thinking around what category to approach in what particular way.
00:09:08 Ben: Once we felt we had enough information, that’s when we started building these mono brands in a category that we felt really hit on a particular why buy, why buy from us, why buy now. It’s like the QVC model of communicating and keeping it simple.
00:09:21 Ben: And so along the way, it’s probably really dissecting and saying there is an aesthetic, there has to be a value that you provide the consumer, and you have to hit a certain quality benchmark within that value.
00:09:35 Ben: And so our brands operate at different values and different qualities. The key thing is that what you pay for at each brand’s level is, we can exceed those expectations. So really the core thing that we try to deliver on.
00:09:51 Ben: And then within that, how do you reduce the things that people don’t care about and how do you over deliver on the things they do? When you’re sitting on your sofa, your tactile senses are interacting with fabrics. So we go with some of the highest quality fabrics that we can get our hands on.
00:10:07 Ben: You’re interacting as a comfort perspective with the foam and the materials that are secondary to the fabric. You don’t care about the wood frame. You don’t care about a 200 pound wood frame being shipped to you. And so we stripped that away. We replaced that with a steel frame. It folds up. It’s lightweight. It’s easy to ship. So we can create cost savings on one end. We reinvest that in higher quality fabric, extremely high quality foam, nn the other hand.
00:10:33 Ben: And we deliver, ultimately, a product that you as a consumer feel really good about. It’s going to last you a long time and it’s at a value and a price point that you would otherwise not be able to find. That’s that rinse repeat, I would say, component of our design process that we adhere to.
00:10:49 Jenny: Super interesting. I never thought about the frame, but that makes a ton of sense. Those things are super heavy. What are some of the other things that people don’t care about?
00:10:57 Ben: One thing that inadvertently we fell into, because we keep our process of manufacturing as simple as we can, obviously, and we try to offer, certainly within a framework of mass customization, the ability to like swap fabrics out.
00:11:09 Ben: Within a production process, we can mass produce certain components. And we produce our fabric across 128 colors on demand to ensure that we offer that long tail of choice that other retailers can’t compete with. It’s too costly for them.
00:11:24 Ben: And so within that, we realized, “Okay. Well, people are not just buying this because they get to choose the fabric. They’re actually buying this because the fabric is removable.” That means it’s washable. It’s long-term longevity for a product.
00:11:37 Ben: If you think about why people buy a sofa, more importantly, why they get rid of it, more often than not, probably within a two, three-year window, four-year window. Those cycles have been compressing over the years. It gets soiled. It gets dirty, pets, kids, things of that nature.
00:11:50 Ben: It became pretty evident that a washable sofa is pretty critical and consumer mindset is shifting into that. And then we really started to focus on, how do we deliver that at great value? How do we make that a machine washable sofa? How do we make sure that as many layers of that are machine washable? That’s been a pretty big success for us.
00:12:11 Jenny: You guys position yourself as building the next gen of home brands powered by community and technology. Can you talk a little bit about each part of that statement? Because that’s pretty unique for a couch company.
00:12:25 Ben: Community, I think, in the sense that our product development pipeline is effectively fed by our customer sentiment feedback. We did a lot around bulk mass customization.
00:12:36 Ben: But really building these feedback groups that, ultimately, we put something out there, we’re giving you a choice, we see where the choices go, and we try to get a closed loop feedback system and quickly iterate on what is it that people want. And so leveraging that information is key for us.
00:12:53 Ben: Our backgrounds are not furniture people. We’re good at building websites, tech, software stacks. That’s our core background before starting a furniture business. And so it’s really about doing the hard work.
00:13:06 Ben: All the ERP systems that are required, the flow of information, the materials coming together, everything being just in time, these are things that historically are quite hard to do. They’re not sexy in terms of you show a great pitch deck and like people look at that and go, “That’s not that interesting.”
00:13:25 Ben: But it’s actually what drives the most value in a business like this. If you get your projections wrong, if you can’t deliver on time, if you don’t deliver fast enough, if you can’t get your inventory turns right, these are all errors in businesses that can effectively kill a company entirely.
00:13:40 Ben: And so we built a lot of that framework out and we’re pretty full stack on that. So AI customer service, we just build these things pretty rapidly and we just tack them on and we look at it as an infrastructure play over time.
00:13:52 Ben: Yes, we’re building brands. The brands sit in this category of furniture, but they sit on the same stack. Certainly over the last couple of years, we’ve seen that the cost and ability to build a brand is becoming lower and lower to us. And that flywheel is speeding up.
00:14:08 Ben: That anchors back into maybe a core thesis we had from day one, which is, is the value of brand the most important thing in today’s landscape of commerce and e-comm and digital commerce in particular? Or is the ability to build brands at scale and have that flywheel and rinse repeat that more important?
00:14:29 Ben: Our bet was 20 years ago in retail in one category, there were 5 or 10 options. Today there’s probably 2000 options. And so consumers can’t just keep up with brands and the many, many options they have today. They’re going to become less and less loyal to brands because there’s just so many choices.
00:14:48 Ben: If that’s the case, then is it important to have one great brand in furniture or is it more valuable to have the flywheel that can build brands and build the next 50 brands in furniture? That’s the thinking around and ultimately what we’re aiming to build over time.
00:15:02 Jenny: Okay. That was my next question was like, “Where do things go? What’s the big vision?” But that is a big vision, spawning these brands that have the same core in how they deliver to customers and how you architect them.
00:15:16 Jenny: Just so everyone knows, I actually might be interested in a couch. So for anyone that wants to buy a couch, what’s the experience? I go to the CABA website. And then what’s my experience from then to getting to my living room?
00:15:28 Ben: So the brands we offer under CABA, you can find them, anabei.com, chicoryhome.com. So there’s a variety of brands. We have half a dozen today. Anabei.com, it’s free shipping, free returns, free swatches. So you can, generally speaking, get a free swatch set shipped to you that will arrive probably within two to three days at the most, depending on where you are in the US. When you place an order, we have Quickhship that ships in 72 hours. Pretty much you can have a sofa in your living room by end of week.
00:15:58 Jenny: That’s insane. I mean, most places, literally to pick a fabric, it’s going to be minimum 12, but mostly six months.
00:16:07 Ben: And so any configuration, it’s modular in nature. So two, three, four, five seater, any configuration you want to pick, you can select and any fabric. It gets delivered to your front door. We go UPS Ground or FedEx Ground. You can assemble the product. It’s probably, I want to say 5 or 10 minutes per seat to assemble.
00:16:26 Jenny: Your customers actually assemble everything themselves?
00:16:29 Ben: They assemble it themselves, but it’s extremely easy. You basically expand the frame. You put four screws down. You click two things in place. And then you put the foam and you put the covers on and that’s it. And so, very easy to assemble.
00:16:41 Ben: Once you’ve done that, you also know how to disassemble it and you can move it easily. It’s lightweight. You can get the covers off. We have our own product here at my house. We have two small kids and so they will mark things up on our white couch. Once every two months, pull the covers off, throw them in the washing machine, put them back on and we’re done. And so it’s just an ease of mind and mindset of not caring too much about this high-end purchase that is going to get destroyed otherwise.
00:17:04 Jenny: I feel like that’s even easier than IKEA products, which always take some assembling.
00:17:11 Ben: It wasn’t always the case, I would say. So we came a long way in terms of just understanding how do you design flat pack furniture. And things that seemed very easy to us in 2019, we’re like, “Oh, this is great. Everybody’s going to love this.” And then you see the real world feedback. I can’t assemble this. And then you’re like, “Oh, okay. Maybe it’s not that great.”
00:17:28 Ben: And so definitely an evolution over time to just understand how easy does it have to be for it to be really palatable across a broad spectrum of people. Yeah, that took a couple years of trial and error, I would say.
00:17:42 Jenny: So shifting gears because I’m still fascinated by your background. When I got into investing, I knew nothing about investing, really. I was an entrepreneur and fell into the investing side. I remember having a lot of supporters and cheerleaders, but not really mentorship. And so I kind of had to learn by doing. Were there any experiences along the way with people that helped you get where you are today? Because you are very much self taught.
00:18:11 Jenny: And so I’ll give you a fun anecdote for me. When I joined Techstars in 2014, I had been a founder before and I remember I had all these companies, 10 companies, 50 people moving into our office and I was running this program. And I remember saying to the founders of Techstars the day before the cohort started, “Well, are you guys like gonna come and make sure I’m doing it right?”
00:18:32 Jenny: And they were like, “Um No. Just don’t kill anyone and you’ll be fine, Jenny.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s fascinating.” So it really was trial by fire. I was just in it and I had to figure it out myself. It was hard, but in a way, just very rewarding. They were very there and very supportive. We’d have weekly calls and all of that. But what were your experiences figuring out how to manage people or any of these things? Was there anything that sticks out?
00:19:01 Ben: Definitely some trial by fire. Thinking back, there’s always these experiences that shape your thinking about certain things. I would say, at Dot & Bo, one of the first companies I joined, just realizing very quickly that e-comm... narrow margins. You have to be extremely focused on every single penny.
00:19:19 Ben: There was one very comical scene that I remember, which was at the time our CEO saw somebody throw a pen in the garbage and picked it up and said, “Why did you just throw this 25 cent pen out? This is perfectly fine.” And I was like, “Hmm, okay. That’s good.” That was one of those interesting experiences for me.
00:19:38 Ben: But it’s hard to say. Help with managing people, I think a lot of it is self taught. A lot of it is just pattern recognition around what works and what doesn’t work over time. Over the years, managing different people in different categories, creative folks versus operations versus engineering, I think everything requires a little bit of a different touch. That’s, I would say, the easy answer.
00:20:00 Ben: The other piece is probably just feedback. Like what I mentioned before, you put something out there and it can be humbling to see what the feedback is. And then you go, “Okay, well, we’re going to have to do a lot better than that.” And so that’s always been a big part of it for us.
00:20:14 Jenny: What are some of the trends in home design or consumer behaviors that you’re excited about right now? Are consumers moving in the right direction, you’d say? And how is AI or the world we’re living in impacting it?
00:20:27 Ben: Consumers are becoming a lot more aware in terms of sustainable materials and things in their home that are going to be healthy for them. In that sense, things are definitely moving in right direction.
00:20:39 Ben: We care a lot about sort of our eco footprint wastage. Again, we have to. Meaning as a company, if we want to offer extraordinary value to our customers, we need to find ways to minimize waste and consumption and the shipping cost and reduce the weight. And so we do a lot of that inherently because we’re always driving to optimize value.
00:21:01 Ben: But I think that categorically people are going in that direction. Hopefully, that creates less waste. The washable sofa for us is an important one because we also think that people throw product out way too early in its product life cycle because of the cosmetic sort of appearance of that product.
00:21:17 Ben: Even if the fabrics don’t hold up after five years, you can buy a new set of fabric from us and you can get another five years out of your sofa. I think we’re moving in that direction. Certainly there’s other people copying that concept slowly and surely and that’s good. That is actually going to make everyone hold on to their product a little bit longer. In that sense, we’re seeing sort of positive trends.
00:21:36 Ben: In terms of AI and how consumer shopping behavior is, it’s been interesting. We’ve experimented with a lot of these things. They’re incrementally interesting. Some shoppers, I would say single digit percentages, find some value. But I think in the end, this is a category where tactile touch and sense matter. Can you replicate some percentage of that with AR in-room visualization? Perhaps.
00:22:02 Ben: But the most important piece, delivering on a great experience in a timely manner and with good value and letting the customer decide, if I don’t like it, I can return it and I’m not going to get penalized for that. That I think drives more value ultimately for us.
00:22:18 Jenny: I feel like the ability to wash cushions… it used to be like they said you could do it, but it was very hard to get them off and you had to dry clean them. Now, I feel like there has been some good innovation.
00:22:29 Jenny: One of my close friends, she has four kids and she was redoing her living room. When I walked in, it was all white. And I was like, “Not really what I would have chosen for those four rugrats.” She’s like, “No, you just, you know, you can just wash it.” And I was like, “Oh, okay.” That’s great.
00:22:43 Ben: The material sciences have come a long way too. So you can achieve those things now with the type of weaving you do with the fabric, both make it stain resistant, make it machine washable. These are all things that otherwise would have complicated that user journey quite a bit.
00:22:57 Jenny: On a personal note, what’s one piece of furniture in your home that means the most to you?
00:23:02 Ben: One, as a designer and over time, you design something and then you look back at your previous design, your V1, and you’re always underwhelmed by it. You do that for a couple of decades and you go, I can’t get attached to V1 or V14 because there will always be a 16 or an 18. And so I don’t know how attached I can be to stuff like that.
00:23:22 Ben: But our couch in the living room, it’s one of our sofas. I think what I like about that product is we did one without a frame, it’s all foam. We have two small kids that dive into the couch and it’s all great, enjoyable, and we don’t have to stress out about it. So that’s probably one that I certainly enjoyed their interaction with it, less more so my own.
00:23:40 Jenny: Okay. Well, this was so fun. We’re going to do a quick speed round before we wrap up. So just one sentence answers or the like. Is there a book you’re reading, a podcast or some media that you’re enjoying right now?
00:23:51 Ben: Amp It Up.
00:23:52 Jenny: If you could live anywhere in the world for just one year, where would it be?
00:23:56 Ben: Tokyo.
00:23:56 Jenny: Favorite productivity hack?
00:23:58 Ben: Loom internal meetings and then replay them at 2x.
00:24:02 Jenny: I love it. 3x for me. And where can listeners find you?
00:24:05 Ben: LinkedIn.com/benparsa.
00:24:08 Jenny: Well, this was so fun, Ben. Great to learn a little more about your history and we’re super excited for CABA and all the brands that you’re launching.
00:24:16 Ben: Awesome. Thanks.
00:24:19 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today’s episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We’re a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We’re a community of 500 founders and operators, and we’ve invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, Everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
Read more from Ben Parsa in Founders Everywhere.