Some 2,000 items flood furniture resale platform Chairish’s website daily.
Vintage and antique furniture, art, rugs, lighting, decor and more proliferate the site’s product pages where designers like Adam Lippes can even be counted among its fanbase (offering his picks and a home tour in a special curation last January).
A plethora of product listings have to be added often to keep inventory fresh and steam-roll the appetite for fast furniture in favor of antique, vintage and resale home goods. In 2020, total online furniture and houseware sales reached $36.1 billion, according to Chairish’s first resale home furnishings report from 2021. But as with fashion, that number is being quickly apportioned to resale. By 2025, $16.6 billion in secondhand furniture is expected to be sold (up 70 percent from 2018).
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To date, the marketplace has sold half a million goods, gobbled up competitors (acquiring online European vintage furniture and art marketplace Pamono last year), started offsetting 100 percent of its carbon emissions and set sights on further expansion. On Tuesday, the platform introduced more than 200,000 new finds direct from Europe, available to shop in the U.S.
Chairish cofounder and chief executive officer, Gregg Brockway, said “enabling Chairish to showcase Europe’s finest sellers is an important step forward in our quest to be the global design community’s source of the world’s finest design objects.”
And it’s not just Chairish sweetening the resale furniture deal. There’s also Kaiyo, another curated marketplace which sprung up in 2015 and has since garnered 150 percent to 200 percent year-over-year revenue growth, according to the company.
“The popularity of apparel resale sites like ThredUp and The RealReal has made consumers more comfortable with shopping secondhand,” said Kaiyo CEO Alpay Koralturk. “Millennials in particular are more willing to shop for pre-loved items as they become increasingly eco-conscious and discerning with their dollars. They’re realizing they can get great designs at a fraction of the price all while feeling good about their purchase.”
With the rise of remote work, shoppers have turned to their immediate surroundings for comfort, outfitting their places with used wares from brands like West Elm, CB2, Ikea, Restoration Hardware and Wayfair, per Kaiyo’s report.
But fashion retailers may be missing out on the growing sustainable home trend.
Home textiles — and bedding, specifically — were the clear category leaders in adoption of the textile standard-setting firm Oeko-Tex’s “Made In Green” traceability label per a press announcement Monday. Oeko-Tex showed continued demand for green-manufactured products and emissions-reducing impact tools.