It started out in 2012 as a small, 18-person office in Irvine whose “tight-knit” team had breakfasts and lunches together. Nowadays, Orange County is home to the biggest chunk of Palo Alto-based Houzz Inc.’s workforce. About 500 employees work in support, sales and e-commerce for the online home-improvement idea generator and marketplace.
“Throughout 2013 and 2014, we grew by hundreds and hundreds,” said Vice President of Sales Jerry Kingkade, who was part of the inaugural team and also first to swoosh down a 30-foot playground slide that connects Houzz’ two floors at the Park Place office building just off the San Diego (405) Freeway in Irvine.
Chief Executive Adi Tatarko co-founded Houzz in 2009 with her husband, Alon Cohen, former senior director of engineering at eBay Inc. in San Jose. The company is among the world’s 150 or so unicorns—startups that have reached $1 billion in valuation.
Last year, Baltimore-based T. Rowe Price Group Inc., a late-stage investor in Houzz, valued it at about $2 billion. That’s down from the $2.3 billion Sequoia Capital in Menlo Park put it at in October 2014, when it invested $165 million in the privately held company.
Houzz.com gets about 40 million visitors each month, most of them homeowners perusing through nearly 12 million project photos for ideas. They also see listings of local businesses specializing in design and home renovation, along with a portfolio of their recently completed projects. Companies that sign up for an annual advertising program get help with standing out among about 1.5 million professionals offering services on Houzz, getting higher rankings on its Find a Pro directory and their project photos featured in keyword search results.
In 2014, Houzz added Marketplace, an e-commerce part of its website where merchants can sell home goods—from lamps, sofas and tables to shelves and faucets. It also developed an app to improve consumers’ experience and increase traffic to businesses advertising on its site. Its Visual Match tool scans project photos consumers save in the app and finds similar products available for purchase on its website. The app’s View in My Room option uses augmented reality to help consumers see how a product they found on Houzz will look in their homes.
OC Strength
The company’s OC sales team’s focus is to “prospect and close home remodeling and design professionals” in the U.S. and Canada.
Tatarko said in a 2015 interview with TechCrunch that Houzz didn’t plan to go public and would instead focus on international expansion.
The company launched country-specific Houzz websites in the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, Singapore and New Zealand—nearly half of new Houzz users come from outside of the U.S. now. In January, it ventured into India, where about 1 million people are “using Houzz every month to find design inspiration, get advice from the largest home community on the web, source products, research, and hire home professionals, and manage home projects from start to finish.”
Houzz’ 150 employees in Palo Alto work on software engineering, marketing and finance operations, according to Kingkade. They also produce and manage editorial content, including “My Houzz,” a video series that follows celebrities “as they renovate the home of someone meaningful to them.” The pilot episode, which aired on YouTube, featured actor Ashton Kutcher, “who secretly remodeled the basement of his family home in Iowa.” Actress Kristen Bell in the second of five episodes that aired last month used the Houzz app to get ideas for her sister Sara’s home in Detroit. Shed Media in Los Angeles is working on the project.
More Hires
Houzz also has offices in San Diego, London, Berlin, Sydney, Moscow and Tokyo. It plans to hire “several hundred customer experience team members” in Nashville, where it recently signed a 10-year lease for a 37,421-square-foot office. The team there will support the “community of shoppers and vendors on the Houzz Marketplace.”
The Irvine office, despite the growth, still fosters the family-friendly atmosphere Kingkade established five years ago. Employees get free snacks and lunch and can stop by yoga and game rooms, chill out in the music lab, or figure out how many of them can fit into a lime green phone-booth. There are no conference rooms, only “patio” rooms with umbrellas and artificial grass, to boot.
“Here at Houzz, culture is No. 1, and it’s extremely important to make sure that our employees love coming to work every day,” Director of Sales Kristen Heimstra said in a recruiting video Houzz posted on its YouTube channel. “We are always coming up with new ways to do that.”
