Wayfair Makes Foray Into Brick-and-Mortar Retail
The e-commerce specialist is expanding its multi-channel play with the opening of a 150,000-square-foot store.
Wayfair, an established online home goods store, has opened its first large-format physical store, a 150,000-square-foot, two-story location in the affluent northern Chicago suburb of Wilmette, Ill. The store opened in time for the Memorial Day weekend, with local media reporting that shoppers were lining up hours before the opening.
Like the online iteration of Wayfair, the physical store will offer furniture, home decor, housewares, appliances and home improvement products. Unlike the online store, there will be human beings on hand at the two-story physical store to provide home decor and improvement advice and in-person events organized for shoppers.
Some items will be available to takeaway immediately, as at a standard physical retail store, while the physical Wayfair will also function as a place where customers examine products in person for an online order and subsequent delivery. The store also includes a small cafe with simple meals, the better to keep shoppers on site longer.
The Wayfair company’s flagship brand is Wayfair, but there are other brands under its aegis, such as Allmodern, Birch Lane, Joss & Main and Perigold, each emphasizing different design aspirations for home-dwellers.
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The roll out of physical locations will be a deliberative process, according to Wayfair Co-Founder & CEO Niraj Shah on the company’s most recent earnings call early in May. This will include some of the company’s other brands in the fullness of time.
“We’re only launching a couple stores for each of our brands and then iterating to make sure that we really dial it in before we then scale [to] make sure that the unit economics work the way we expect,” Shah said on the call. “We don’t necessarily expect that you get that right out the gate.”
The company’s roll out comes at a time of higher levels of e-commerce activity, but not high enough to replace the urge to shop in physical stores, according to a study by PYMNTS and Amazon Web Services. More than half of shoppers surveyed—53 percent—said they prefer to buy home goods in stores, the study notes.
Retail headwinds still strong
As a sector, retail real estate has faced a decade or more of sluggish demand for some categories, though it did see some rebound after pandemic-era restrictions were lifted. More recently, retail sales have turned in some sluggish numbers, with sales flat month-over-month in April 2024 and up 2.7 percent compared with a year ago, which doesn’t quite meet the rate of inflation for the same period (3.4 percent), according to the Census Bureau.
Home furnishing and furniture stores have been particularly hard-hit by consumers pulling back lately, with that category’s sales off 0.5 percent for the month in April 2024, and down 8.4 percent compared with a year ago, the bureau reports.
Wayfair is facing some of the same headwinds, with the company reporting a net loss of $248 million during the first quarter of 2024, though that was a year-over-year improvement compared with the net loss of $347 million during the first quarter of 2023.
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