A massive move for Wayfair

Online retailer to open a huge in-person store

Online retailer Wayfair is planning an in-person store — and it's a big one. The home furnishings giant announced earlier this month that it will launch a 150,000-squarefoot outlet in Wilmette, Ill. The Edens Plaza location will feature 19 departments devoted to categories such as furniture, decor and home improvement.

They're contained in four main areas. The Dream Center focuses on mattresses, while the Market Square is stocked with housewares, daily essentials and textiles. The Design Studio is where Wayfair experts dole out free advice, and The Porch is an on-site restaurant.

Early artist renderings of the exterior show it as a two-storey building accented with the brand's signature purple and bearing the Wayfair logo. Tweak the architecture and swap out purple for blue and yellow, and you've got a near-doppelgänger for Ikea.

Construction on the space started in 2022, reports NBC Chicago. A spokesperson told the outlet that the store will employ roughly 200 people. It opens on May 23.

Founded in 2002, Wayfair now offers more than 30 million items online and has 22.4 million active customers, according to its website. The Boston-based company employs 13,000 people in North America and Europe, reports CBS News, and it already has several smaller bricks-and-mortar stores.

Wayfair's e-commerce offerings were a godsend in 2020, when the pandemic hit and people found themselves increasingly at home. The company was well-positioned to serve those who balked at visiting bricks-and-mortar retailers.

“We actually saw demand start to rise right away,” co-founder Niraj Shah told Bloomberg that year. “Things that you use for cooking, like refrigerators, freezers, cookware; things that you'd use for having kids at home, like kids' desks, kids' furniture, trampolines, swing sets; and things that you would use to work at home, like desks and office chairs.”

But the pandemic bump now seems to be flattening out. Wayfair laid off 1,750 employees in 2023 and released another 1,650 workers this past January, reports CBS News.

Perhaps the move to more in-person shopping is a way to help offset past losses as well as protect against any future ones.

Not that Wayfair's online business risks closing any time soon. The company reported net revenue of US$12 billion in 2023.