Nathan Cohen is CEO of Modani, a modern furniture retailer he co-founded in 2007 with two European partners. The company grew out of the founders' own frustration with the lack of affordable, well-designed contemporary furniture, opening its first showroom in Miami with the aim of disrupting the pricier end of the design furniture market, and has since grown into one of the country's top furniture retailers.
Cohen built the business around an integrated retail model that pairs physical showrooms with a strong online presence, recognizing early on that furniture retailers selling only online faced unsustainable customer acquisition costs while traditional retailers alone struggled to compete with e-commerce. His approach relies on geo-targeted marketing tied to showroom openings, letting customers discover the brand online before experiencing the furniture in person.
He has focused the company's strategy on making modern design accessible across a wide range of budgets without compromising quality, adding tools like an online room planner and augmented reality features, while also working to reduce the amount of returned inventory that ends up in landfills through recycling and donation programs.
