IKEA or no IKEA, India´s Urban Ladder has been climbing steadily
(WorldNews India)

This is the first in a series of Q&As tracing the journeys of startups that have become household names in India. At 11 am on July 12, 2012, UrbanLadder.com went live. The furniture retail portal had a catalogue of just around 25 items, the brainchild of two people with no background in designing or selling beds and sofas. However, Ashish Goel and Rajiv Srivatsa-Indian Institute of Management Bangalore batchmates with earlier stints at McKinsey and Infosys, respectively-had spent the previous year traveling across India. Their goal: understand what consumers wanted and identify suppliers. Their hard work began paying off on day one. The first order on UrbanLadder.com came within an hour of...