A Bedding E-Commerce Start-Up Cuts Out the Middlemen

A new e-commerce company, Crane & Canopy, is trying to use the Web to save customers department store markups on pillows and comforters.

The three-month-old Bay Area start-up says it saves customers up to 70 percent off designer prices, because it designs, sells and ships the products itself, cutting out the fees from licensing firms, importers and exporters, and retail stores.

Crane & Canopy is one of a bunch of e-commerce start-ups that is cutting out the middlemen to sell items directly to consumers at discounted prices. They make their products at the same factories the designers use, but contract with them directly. The trend has the potential to reshape the way everything from office supplies to eyeglasses are sold.

A queen-size white, pintuck duvet cover on Crane & Canopy, for instance, is $99, while a similar one at West Elm is $119 and at Bloomingdale’s is $190.

“From the get-go, flattening the supply chain was part of the process,” said Christopher Sun, who founded the company with Karin Shieh after they met at Harvard Business School. “It took almost a year to get through the supply chain. It’s that convoluted.”

The strategy also means that the company can introduce new products every few days, instead of just every season like the big brands that have to coordinate with stores and licensing companies months in advance.

That means the company gets almost immediate feedback from customers, on Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere, so it can adapt on the fly based on what people like and don’t like, Ms. Shieh said.

Ms. Shieh said she had tried to create contemporary, feminine designs that she and her friends could not find when they wanted to decorate their homes. The designs, which tend to be bland, are named after San Francisco locales — the Marina has a swirl pattern and the Dolores is floral.

Another innovation for people who hate to make the bed: its signature duvet cover looks like it has a flat sheet for people who want to get rid of the pesky flat sheet that bunches up at the end of the bed, and zips instead of buttons for easy removal.

Crane & Canopy, which so far has raised money from angel investors, hopes to expand to other home products beyond bedding, like towels and sofa pillows.

“We’re trying new things with home goods that the big players have never tried, because we’re going to the factories directly and saying, ‘Let’s do something different,’” Ms. Shieh said.