Our mission is to empower everyone to design spaces, together. The Landing is a fundamentally different approach to the existing options of endless choice filtered on price or convenience (e.g. online furniture marketplaces), or alternatively, a “full service” design tool that removes all decision-making from the consumer (e.g. e-design services). We’ve created a set of tools, inspiration, and light-touch support that fits seamlessly into your existing process, but just makes it easier. At the core of this is our free, online, collaborative design tool.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Ellie Buckingham and Miri Buckland.
Ellie Buckingham and Miri Buckland are Co-founders, and CEO and COO, respectively, of The Landing. Prior to The Landing, Buckingham spent her days on the trading floor at Goldman Sachs and her nights in the painting studio. Buckland studied Economics at Oxford and worked in Corporate Strategy at SKY TV before moving to Silicon Valley to study at Stanford and launch The Landing.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
The Landing was born during a chance roadtrip we found ourselves on in September 2017. We had both just started at Stanford Business School, and the recent pain of moving and furnishing our dorm rooms was top of mind.
Ellie is the quintessential advice giver and “design-y best friend” — the daughter of an interior designer with a BA in Fine Arts who always found herself designing in her free time. Very left brain/right brain, she was a double major in Economics for good measure and was coming into business school with years of experience on the trading floor in Goldman Sachs.
Miri was the perennial mover and customer in need of design help. Originally from London, Miri has moved around a ton, each time gaining deeper appreciation for the impact our spaces can have on our wellbeing, especially in new environments. She was entering Stanford with a background in operations, analysis and corporate strategy at Sky TV in London.
Seated next to each other on that long drive to Southern California, we discovered our endless curiosity for why things didn’t work and how to make them better, a shared passion for magical customer experiences, and the complementary way our brains worked. Bonding over our terrible moving/furnishing experiences, the seed of The Landing was born!
We then spent months diving into the customer problem both in and out of the classroom, including many afternoons at IKEA with clipboards and our best interviewing techniques. We discovered not only a need for a new approach to furnishing, but also our complementary skill sets, Ellie’s creative thinking combined with Miri’s systems-orientation, and similar values: eternal optimism, grit, EQ over ego, and making empathetic team building a priority. With the support of professors and resources from both Stanford Business School and Stanford’s d.school, we started rapidly prototyping different solutions to the furnishing problem. We ran a beta in SF the summer of 2019, and in the year since then, we have built out a team, created and launched our interactive design tool, partnered with over 25 inspiring suppliers and started creating space, together.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
Our mission is to empower everyone to design spaces, together. The Landing is a fundamentally different approach to the existing options of endless choice filtered on price or convenience (e.g. online furniture marketplaces), or alternatively, a “full service” design tool that removes all decision-making from the consumer (e.g. e-design services). We’ve created a set of tools, inspiration, and light-touch support that fits seamlessly into your existing process, but just makes it easier. At the core of this is our free, online, collaborative design tool.
We exist to empower creativity and we’re here to shake up the belief that individuals are either inherently creative or not. We’re not here to tell you what to do in the traditional interior designer sense or impose an off-the-shelf design you’ve seen elsewhere. Instead, we’re empowering anyone to design, envision, explore and execute on their vision for an inspiring space. We’re here to help you discover, to support you if you need it, and to enable you to collaborate with people who know you best.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Last summer, in the middle of graduation, we started running a very manual beta test in San Francisco. We wanted to test our idea of providing an end-to-end furnishing solution, which, in reality, meant designing customers’ apartments over Google Slides, ordering all of their items to our storage unit in the Mission, renting a u-haul, delivering and assembling over 200 pieces of furniture in 10 weeks. Needless to say, we came out of the summer both physically and mentally stronger than ever and with many funny stories of things gone wrong. A particular instance that comes to mind was when we delivered a couch to a customer that came in 2 halves. It was only once we had lugged it across the city and up 2 flights of stairs that we realised the supplier had sent us two left-hand sides! Thankfully, our customer was incredibly understanding and put up with half of a couch for a few days!
Our beta test was super high-touch and not a scalable business model but we are so glad that we took the time to go through the furnishing journey with our customers and really listen to them. We proved and disproved so many of our hypotheses in such a short time. If we hadn’t taken the time to do that, we would be building a completely different business, and one that few people actually want.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
Anne Raimondi — our GSB lecturer turned mentor and investor Anne has been an amazing source of inspiration, support, and guidance along the way. From our first day’s in Anne’s startup garage class at the GSB, to our regular meetings since, she has been a calm and guiding force, always asking the right probing questions to see things from a different perspective, and giving us the confidence needed to take the leap. She always encouraged us to keep asking “why” and get as close as possible to our customers, letting their feedback guide us.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
When you think of disruption in business, you often think about things that ultimately have a positive impact on consumers by giving them access to higher-value options. We purposefully didn’t say cheaper or better — often times, in mature industries, customers are getting over-engineered products with features they don’t actually need, so ‘disruptors’ can come in at the lower-end of the market and provide simpler, cheaper products that actually are better-fit to the customer need. On the other hand, improvements to supply-chain often result in the same products but lower cost, which can be amazing. We’ve seen this a lot in direct-to-consumer companies that have “cut out the middleman” and provided customers access to the same products, with less mark-up.
However, we think this type of disruption has likely had a net negative impact in the home furnishing industry. We’ve seen a flood of mass-market furniture brands providing cheaper, mass-produced products to consumers. On the surface, this is great, because the products are cheaper. In practice, this has meant lower-quality, shorter-lasting products that consumers have to replace frequently and ultimately end up in landfills. While it’s a generalization, these products tend to also be built by large companies that are less intentional about values, employee culture, and sustainability.
At The Landing, we’ve been very intentional about building against this mass-produced reality, and instead have built with value in mind, when curating our product assortment. We don’t think of products in terms of ticket price, but in terms of value — while our product mix might be more expensive than that on a Wayfair, we know the quality is higher so you are getting a longer-lasting, better designer product. Some investors have called this “disruptive” when really, we’re just taking the industry back to the standard of quality it had before it was “disrupted” in the first place.
Can you share 3 of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
“Create space for joy”. A core belief at The Landing is the importance of creating physical, mental, and shared space. Our homes are the backdrops to our lives and now, amidst COVID, we’re using our spaces in more ways that we could ever have imagined. Beyond the physical, we believe that our outer world shapes, encourages, and expresses our inner worlds. This belief is so core to our business, our mission, and our team that we turned it into a company value of “creating space for joy”. For us, this means celebrating each other, making time for the activities and people who bring us joy, and encouraging our users to create joy through creativity on The Landing.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
We’re just getting started! In a broader sense, we fundamentally believe that the shopping experience, especially in the home furnishing market, is changing. We’re no longer optimizing around conversion, but engagement. If you think about furniture shopping in the physical world, it is fun, collaborative, social and interactive. But online, it has typically been all about search, endless choice, price and convenience. We believe that consumers crave a new experience — a personalized experience that allows them to collaborate with friends and brings entertainment back into the furnishing journey. We have many exciting new features in the works to make The Landing even more collaborative and social experience.
In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by ‘women disruptors’ that aren’t typically faced by their male counterparts?
We’re deep believers in the fact that ‘weaknesses’ and strengths are often two sides of the same coin. There is a lot of talk about how women leaders are ‘too sensitive’ or ‘too emotional’. While we think using ‘too’ in terms of any adjective is problematic in it’s implied judgment, we embrace the idea of sensitivity, emotion, and most importantly empathy in the way we’re building our company.
Our natural inclination to empathy is a superpower that we believe we have as ‘women disruptors’ that is not as typically exhibited in male-dominated environments (though to be honest, even this generalization of both gender-identities feels unfair!). When we look back at what it took to pivot company strategy so quickly and launch effectively in a pandemic, the unsung hero was our and team’s ability to continue to perform at a very high-level while moving through immense change. We know this level of excellence was enabled by a deep sense of empathy — a combination of personalized support, creating space, and a sense of responsibility for each other.
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
This is a tough one — there are so many to choose from!
We love the podcast “How to Fail by Elizabeth Day”, a podcast that self-describes as celebrating the things that haven’t gone right. It’s about understanding that learning how we fail in life, actually means learning how to succeed better. From authors and journalists, to musicians and chefs, Elizabeth delves into the stories of her guests three biggest failures. It’s her reframing of failure as something to be celebrated, talked about, encouraged and important, that is so refreshing and so relatable. Failure is a crucial part of the journey in starting a business and trying to build something that hasn’t been done before. There are highs and lows on a daily basis, and some of our biggest directional shifts have come from being proven wrong in our hypotheses. The way we frame failure is critical to our leadership as founders and our team culture.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
One of our favorite quotes came from a professor at the GSB during our last lectures before graduation. He said, “Regret for what you’ve done can be tempered with time. Regret for what you’ve not done cannot”. This quote so perfectly captures our perspective on taking the leap of faith to start The Landing and pursue entrepreneurship. As we approached graduation and faced the choice of a traditional, steady corporate job versus the unpredictable adventure of starting a business, we both knew in our gut that it wasn’t really a choice at all. We had cultivated the perfect storm of finding each other (the ying to our yang), deep conviction in the problem we’re trying to solve, and unbounded determination. As Ellie always says, the risk wasn’t in taking the leap of faith, the risk was in not taking the leap.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Our goal is to be one of the leading voices in a new wave of companies that refuses to accept the status quo, and instead builds a new, more equitable normal. We hope to inspire a movement within entrepreneurship that prioritizes how we build our companies, as well as what we build.
We never expected to launch our company amidst a global pandemic and a period of unprecedented national movement, but we’re incredibly grateful for the opportunity to do so. We are planting the seeds today for a radically different tomorrow — making diversity, equity and inclusion a priority from the get-go. We want to do things differently in the home-furnishing market, a market that is traditionally dominated by white- and male-owned brands. We’re starting by committing to the 15% pledge of having 15% of our brands be Black-owned businesses by the end of the year. We’re also taking an intersectional lens to our existing environmental and sustainability goals, one that advocates for the protection of both people and our planet.
We are in the process of laying the building blocks of our foundation as a company, from values, to policies, to processes, and know that every decision — especially at such an early stage — can have outsized effects on our future. As such, we are committed to weaving the movement for reparation and equity into the fabric of our company through the decisions we make in the platform we are creating, the brands we are elevating, and the team we are building.
We hope we can inspire the new wave of founders to do the same.
How can our readers follow you online?
You can follow us on instagram @thelandinghome and check out our blog at www.thelandinghome.com
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Meet The Disruptors: How Ellie & Miri Buckland of ‘The Landing’ Are Shaking Up the Design Industry was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.