E-Commerce Home Decor Brands Are Opening Storefronts. Why?

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A decade ago, the dominant retail story was complete and total collapse. In 2017, Bloomberg’s “retail apocalypse” framing captured a pre-pandemic period during which countless chains were announcing thousands of store closures, distressed debt was piling up, and too many legacy retailers were trapped in oversized footprints and abysmal balance sheets. Amazon was a contributor, of course, but so was debt, oversupply, and a retail landscape built for a different kind of consumer.

That cultural shift and confluence of economic factors is what makes our current moment so interesting. The store is back but not in the same form and not for the same reasons. Now, some of the brands moving into physical retail are the very ones that built their identities online first. In home decor especially, that shift is quite surprising.

Wayfair has now opened its second large-format store in Atlanta, after launching its first in Wilmette, Illinois in 2024, and it already has additional locations planned in Columbus, Denver, and Yonkers. Business of Home described the Atlanta opening not as a one-off experiment but as part of Wayfair’s push to “become a true omnichannel retailer with a fleet of physical locations.”

But why is this happening now?

Why Are E-commerce Home Decor Brands Opening Storefronts Now?

Because home is still a tactile category

This is the simplest answer to a more wide-ranging question. Home decor and furniture are much harder to buy with total confidence from a screen than many other consumer goods. Even with AR tools, AI-powered recommendations, room visualizers, and better product imagery than brands had a decade ago, shoppers want to see scale, test comfort, compare finishes, and understand color in real life. They want to know how a fabric feels, how a sofa suits their individual bodies, whether a wood finish is way too warm or too cool, and whether something looks high-end and quality or a little cheap in person.

Wayfair’s Atlanta store responds to that need. The 150,000-square-foot format includes furniture, decor, housewares, appliances, and home improvement merchandise, with styled vignettes, take-home goods, and even working kitchen and bath fixtures. That is not just merchandising theater. It is a way of reducing hesitation in a category where returns, disappointment, and second-guessing can be expensive.

Because omnichannel is no longer optional

The old binary between online and offline matters less than it used to. Retailers increasingly want customers to move between channels in a frictionless manner: browse online, test in person, take home a side table the same day, and have the sofa delivered later. Wayfair says the core of its retail strategy is a “seamless shopping experience, whether online or in-store,” and its Atlanta store is explicitly designed as a physical extension of its digital assortment.

The store offers shoppers immediate carry-out merchandise, while larger items are fulfilled through local distribution infrastructure. That setup is less about abandoning e-commerce than completing the circle of contemporary consumerism.

Because stores can bring in new customers, not just serve existing ones

One of the strongest arguments for physical expansion is that a store can function as a customer-acquisition engine. According to Wayfair, the company’s first large-format store in Wilmette helped Illinois sales grow more than 15 percent faster than the U.S. overall from the store’s launch through the end of 2024.

Consumer Edge’s transaction analysis goes even further, arguing that Wayfair’s in-store growth has not mainly come from customers shifting channels, but from new shoppers entering the brand. It reported that in-store sales at the Wilmette location had risen 10x by Q1 2026, while online sales remained essentially flat relative to baseline. Even if you weigh that number cautiously, the broader point is that a physical store can widen the funnel.

Because digital growth is still real, but it’s not enough on its own

Official U.S. Census data shows that e-commerce accounted for 16.4 percent of total retail sales in 2025. That’s a meaningful share, but it also means the overwhelming majority of retail spending still happened somewhere other than a pure online cart. In the fourth quarter of 2025, e-commerce accounted for 18.3 percent of total retail sales. At the same time, total retail sales have increased YOY, making that disparity more significant.

Online retail is still a large part of the market. But physical retail still accounts for most of the spending, especially in categories where people want to compare materials, scale, and comfort in person.

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Because the economics of online-only customer acquisition have gotten harder

Many digitally native brands were built in a cheaper digital environment. Paid social was less crowded, customer acquisition costs were lower, and investors were often willing to tolerate long stretches of growth without much profit discipline behind it. That isn’t the retail environment now. Physical stores can now do that paid social once did more cheaply: they build awareness, create trust, produce content, anchor local marketing, and give customers a reason to engage with the brand beyond an ad.

In other words, the store is a sales floor PLUS media, sampling, service, and brand theater. Forbes’s Pamela N. Danziger argues that digitally native brands increasingly use their digital channels not just for transactions, but to drive shoppers into stores as part of a broader omnichannel strategy.

Because the broader retail environment is more supportive than the headlines suggest

The retail-collapse chapter of this story hasn’t disappeared, but it’s not the whole book either. In that same January 2026 article for Forbes, Pamela N. Danziger reported that announced store openings were outpacing closures, with 1,201 openings against 733 closures, citing Coresight Research. She explained that retail sales through November were up 4.2 percent year over year, excluding autos and gas, and that non-store retail was still growing, though more slowly than it had the year before.

Home furnishings had also started to recover. Danziger reported that the category was up 3 percent through November after declines in 2024 and 2023. That doesn’t make the sector a “home run”, but it does make expansion look less reckless than it would have a few years ago. It also helps explain why some of the brands opening stores now are not legacy chains trying to defend old ground but e-commerce companies that think the timing finally makes sense for B&M.

Because the winners are using stores differently than legacy chains did

This is why we’re drawing a comparison between 2017 and 2026. The store boom of earlier decades was heavily dependent on more square footage, more doors, and more suburban coverage. Bloomberg’s 2017 reporting points to that problem, noting that the U.S. was already considered over-stored before e-commerce reached its current scale. Many of those chains were carrying too much space and too much debt at the same time.

Wayfair’s current strategy looks very different than that of its legacy peers. In Business of Home’s April 2026 coverage of the company’s second large-format store, Warren Shoulberg reports that the Atlanta location gives more space to seasonal goods near the entrance and puts greater emphasis on take-home merchandise.

The model that Wayfair executive Liza Lefkowski describes is a very different model from the older big-box assumption that every store needed to do everything in the same way. Wayfair is using stores to test merchandising, fulfillment, local demand, and customer behavior, with a digital and distribution network already behind it.

Because consumers are shopping more fluidly now

People don’t shop in neat channel categories anymore. They browse on a phone, save their favorites, visit a store, leave, come back later, order online, and return something in person the next time they’re out running errands. In that January 2026 article for Forbes, Danziger described that behavior as “increasingly fluid,” citing L.E.K. Consulting and Placer.ai. She cautions us from feeding into the old idea that customers are either online shoppers or store shoppers. Most are both.

That matters a lot in home. Furniture and decor are harder to judge from a product grid than a lot of other retail categories. A shopper might like a chair online and still want to see it in person before spending the money. They might want to compare finishes, test comfort, or figure out whether the scale feels right in a real setting. A store and its customer service can answer those questions much faster and more naturally than a returns process or an AI agent can.

Designers Get It Because We’re Already Doing It

Designers already understand this behavior because we’ve never relied on screens alone. We go to High Point. We walk showroom floors. We pull spec sheets. We compare finishes side by side. We work with craftsmen who create custom furniture. We look at the wood tone next to the fabric. We also talk to reps and vendors. A showroom visit lets us see pieces in person, but it also lets us see what else is available, what can be customized, what the lead time looks like, what has been discontinued, and what another client has actually ordered in that finish or fabric.

That’s why e-commerce home brands opening storefronts doesn’t feel especially new from a designers POV. It’s not radical. It feels very familiar, in fact. Designers have always used our physical experiences to gather information that a product page can’t possibly give us. The broader customer might not ask those same questions in the same language, but we share a goal. Just like us, they want to see the piece, touch the material, and get a better sense of what they are buying before they spend the money. A storefront gives them a version of what showrooms and trade markets have always given the design industry.

So, What’s Actually Happening for Consumers and Brands?

E-commerce home decor brands are opening storefronts because online retail has matured, not because it has failed. The low-hanging digital gains have already been grabbed. What’s left are the less accessible segments of the category: material, scale, comfort, finish, trust, and timing. Home still has a physical problem built into it. People want to touch upholstery, stand next to a dresser, compare woods and metals in person, and figure out whether something looks and feels equal to its listed price.

This is the core of why the storefront has re-entered the picture. It gives these brands a place to reduce hesitation, support returns and service, build visibility in a market, and let customers spend time with the product before they commit. Wayfair is the best example thus far because it’s moving fast and doing so publicly. Its second large-format store is already open, a third is scheduled for Columbus in June 2026, Denver is expected in the fourth quarter, and Yonkers is planned for early 2027.

A lot of the chains caught in the old retail-apocalypse story were overloaded with debt and too much square footage. Bloomberg’s 2017 reporting was right about that. What’s happening now is very different. The brands opening stores today are doing it with better data, tighter formats, local fulfillment, and a clearer reason for the space. In home decor, that makes a lot of backed-by-numbers sense.

Written by the DesignDash Editorial Team
Our contributors include experienced designers, firm owners, design writers, and other industry professionals. If you’re interested in submitting your work or collaborating, please reach out to our Editor-in-Chief at editor@designdash.com.