Amazon’s not the only big online retailer that’s exploring the brick-and-mortar space.
Home furnishings retailer Wayfair has announced plans to open a 15,000-square-foot physical location in Wilmette, Ill. The store will carry a variety of home goods, including furniture. home decor, housewares and home improvement products.
And, like many giant home goods stores, it will also have its own restaurant—called The Porch. The permanent location, which will open on May 23, follows test stores in other locations.
Wayfair’s expansion comes at a tenuous time for the company. Its 2023 sales fell 1.8% and it posted a net loss for the year. The company also laid off 13% of its workforce in January, totaling some 1,650 workers. That followed 1,750 job cuts in 2023.
Wayfair has struggled against larger online retailers, something CEO Niraj Shah wrote in a January memo to staff.
“We went overboard in hiring during a strong economic period and veered away from our core principles, and while we have come quite far back to them, we are not quite there,” Shah wrote, as quoted by The Wall Street Journal.
Shah also was criticized last year for telling employees to work harder and blend their personal life with their professional one. The idea, he wrote, that staff should not work late was “laughably false”.
The hope is the brick and mortar store will spur consumers to buy more, as discretionary spending on big-ticket items online, such as the furniture that is Wayfair’s bread and butter, has plunged since the end of the pandemic.
Physical locations are a gamble, though, and don’t always pay off. Amazon last month announced it was closing all of its “Amazon 4-Star” locations and pop-up kiosks, which had begun rolling out in 2015. Whole Food Market stores, of course, are not affected by the pullback.
