Anushka Mahanti co-founded FableRoom in April 2025, stepping away from a decade spent in consumer businesses including Amazon and Arla Foods to build an online lifestyle brand shaped by a simple question: “Why does well-made homeware cost so much?”
Anushka is now the chief business officer at FableRoom, an online D2C lifestyle brand that aims to bring affordable luxury to homewares and lifestyle shoppers, offering more than 1200 SKUs across furniture, rugs, home textiles and accessories.
The website now boasts upwards of 200,000 visitors each month. In under a year, it sold products to more than 12,000 UK households, generating a 4.7-star Trustpilot rating from over 800 verified reviews, and has featured in the Daily Mail, House & Garden, Ideal Home, Woman & Home and House Beautiful.
Offering customers homewares “straight from its makers”, FableRoom sims to deliver what Anushka describes as “affordable luxury – design-led pieces at fair prices that don’t feel needlessly out of reach”, and, she adds, has saved those customers in excess of £5m against comparable retail pricing since its launch.
“Our proposition is deliberately straightforward – affordable luxury without the traditional retail markup,” Anushka explains, “with homewares comparable to those offered by established retailers such as Heal’s, West Elm and Soho Home, but typically priced around 30-60% lower, with full transparency over sourcing and production.”
The value of visibility
Before Amazon, Anushka worked at Arla Foods across brand and innovation roles spanning the UK, Denmark and the Middle East, and there developed a focus on provenance-led categories, and how trust shapes purchasing decisions.
“At Arla, I saw that consumers are not naive,” she says. “They want to know what they’re buying, how it's processed, and why it costs what it does. That’s not niche consumer behaviour – it's where the market is going.”
Upon leaving Amazon, Anushka began examining the structure behind the category, and saw a system “built on multiple intermediaries. Each one added margin. Each one also pushed the customer further away from the people actually making the products.
“Working at Amazon teaches you a particular kind of rigour,” she continues. “You're accountable for every assumption. But you also see, every single day, how much customers respond to transparency and genuine value.”
FableRoom works directly with certified manufacturing partners and artisans across India and Vietnam, removing traditional wholesale intermediaries from the chain. Customers can see where the products are made, who made them, and what they are made from, she says: “In a category often defined by aspiration and opacity, that visibility is central to the proposition.
“We don't obscure what we do. We lead with it. Because when customers understand the value chain, the saving isn't a discount – it's just honesty.
“India already exports around $13b in home decor annually – heading to $21b by 2030. Our textiles, our artistry and our craftsmanship are celebrated the world over. And yet there is still no globally recognised home decor brand built from India. FableRoom is part of the answer to that.”
The importance of over-delivery
Early growth has been driven largely by word of mouth and repeat customers, alongside press coverage. Brand searches are now rising each month, alongside organic tags posted by satisfied customers.
“We are rated excellent because the product over-delivers against expectation,” she says. “That over-delivery is a structural feature, not a lucky outcome. It is what happens when you remove the middlemen.”
FableRoom, which also runs a trade programme for interior designers, show home consultants, agents and commercial projects, offering tiered pricing of up to 25% off across the range, is now focused on expanding its UK footprint and moving into adjacent lifestyle categories, and Anushka frames the project less as ‘disruption’, and more as ‘correction’.
“We are in the very early chapters of this,” she says. “Every home we reach is a validation that the model works. That customers want beautiful, well-made things at prices that feel right.”
Read our full interview with Anushka in June's issue.
