Up until the middle of the 20^th century, much of the furniture found in American homes was handed down from previous generations, and most of the pieces were handmade. The origin of the “wood goods” was from East Coast furniture manufacturers, like Virginia-based Bassett (1902) and New York and North Carolina-based Stickley (1900), among others. They drew on a bounty of available hardwoods and softwoods grown in the region as well as the talents of New England craftsmen, many of them immigrants.

Heirlooms on Decline

Back in the day, it was considered an honor for the next generation to receive a cherished collectible or utilitarian item being handed down. It was viewed with the same respect and appreciation as a great uncle or aunt held for family heirlooms. Not so today.

The EPA estimates that 9 million tons of furniture are tossed every single year. That is roughly 5 percent of everything brought to landfills (a sizable amount considering all the food waste and packaging we throw away).

When it comes to present-day furniture hand-me-downs, most bets are off. Unless you are talking about a 19^th Century Louis XVI roll-top desk or some coveted mid-century modern pieces from Eames or Le Corbusier. Next gens are likely to turn up their noses at once treasured offerings.

Where Furniture Goes to Die

Now with the proliferation of low-cost composite wood furnishings out of Asia and the growth of “flat-pack” case goods from IKEA and others, the challenge of what to do with the “unloved” loveseat or the college dorm desk has become an ever-increasing environmental nightmare.

The EPA estimates that 9 million tons of furniture are tossed every single year. That is roughly 5 percent of everything brought to landfills (a sizable amount considering all the food waste and packaging we throw away). Not only is this furniture wasteful, but it is also clearly not a worthwhile investment.

The problem has been exacerbated given the popularity of lower quality “fast furniture” which gets randomly discarded. These products are often difficult to recycle, as they contain multiple materials, requiring costly disassembly. In some cases, they contain toxic chemicals, making them impossible to recycle. More often, however, the items are still useful but out of favor, so what to do?

Recommerce Is Front Row Seating

The recommerce industry has flourished over the last few years. This is attributed to rising inflation as well as consumer and market trends such as sustainable shopping and supply shortages driven by the pandemic. Next-gen consumers accept the idea of secondhand, applaud, and seek it out across a wide product spectrum. In fact, home goods and furniture are the fastest growing recommerce categories, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9 percent since 2020. It is expected to reach $23.6 billion by 2025.

For the upper-end furniture market, there are several players acting as market intermediaries and resellers. They cater to luxury, high-design brands, and vintage or collectible furnishings. Among them, are resellers 1stDibs, The RealReal Recollection, Etsy, and Chairish. Like other marketplaces, these players offer a forum for third-party resellers, antique or estate dealers, and the like. They have avid, but niche followings and offer both buyers and sellers attractive highly shoppable websites, but they have their limitations.

Market Democratization

More recently there has been an influx of new players, addressing the much larger mass-market furniture resale needs. These go well beyond the established Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, and eBay sellers, which have been an effective “clearing house” for forgotten or unloved furniture, along with tons of other stuff.

In fact, in 2022, eBay’s recommerce alone resulted in 73,000 metric tons of consumer goods being reused instead of ending up in landfills, along with 1.6 million metric tons of avoided carbon emissions.

Now, the world’s largest furniture company has done a major circularity turnabout. In response to years of criticism aimed at IKEA’s recycling practices, the company has had a major refocus on sustainability. It is part of Ikea’s effort to become a circular business by 2030, starting with selling their “gently used” items through their “As-Is Online” program where selected online products may be reserved and picked up in-store.

Ikea also piloted a buy-back and resell program in Philadelphia in the summer of 2021 and shortly after that began to expand to other cities. The program is available exclusively to IKEA Family members, and payment comes in the form of an IKEA refund card. According to IKEA the buyback value usually runs between 30 and 50 percent of the original price.

Kaiyo: The Disruptor

But there is another brand way ahead of Ikea in the furniture recommerce space with a holistic, turnkey offering. Kaiyo (pronounced kiyo) set out to “own the furniture resale business, from beginning to end” as their CEO Alpay Koralturk described it to me when I first interviewed him in December 2021.

Since their founding in 2014, their mission has been to keep as much furniture out of landfills and in people’s homes as possible. I recently received an extensive update on the company’s developments and growth over the relatively brief period since my initial contact.

Besides doubling the amount of product that they have kept out of landfills to nearly five million pounds, Kaiyo has experienced more than 100 percent consistent growth every month over the past two years due to growing interest in the circular economy and pandemic-induced supply chain issues. Frankly, they have built a superior industry mousetrap.

Covering All the Bases

Once a customer has registered on the Kaiyo website and completed the requisite queries, Kaiyo offers customers an “instant offer” on selected furniture items. The caveat is that in cases where Kaiyo “is unable to make a fair and desirable offer to the sellers” given the condition or low secondary market value; the rejected items usually end up on other marketplaces.

Once sellers receive an offer, they can calculate their delivery cost during checkout. Currently, Kaiyo offers white glove pickup and delivery to the greater New York City area, Los Angeles, San Diego, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and the Washington D.C. metro areas. For customers outside that area, they have established relationships with a network of trusted third-party shippers who will pick up the furniture and deliver it to one of their warehouses.

Once received, the items are inspected, cleaned, and photographed, in preparation for posting on their user-friendly marketplace. After having introduced the white glove offering in Los Angeles in July 2022, they plan to expand the service to additional markets in the future.

Getting Very Social

One of the contributors to Kaiyo’s impressive, recent growth has been a very stealthy and effective social media marketing effort, which revolves around two content pillars. The first is “Kaiyo Finds” — videos that feature the amazing pieces that arrive at their warehouses daily. “Our viewers love the thrill of the hunt, so these videos are a great way to build excitement around our unique, ever-changing collection of furniture, as well as the amazing bargains available.”

The second pillar is Kaiyo’s “Better with Age” campaign. This involves a peek inside the homes of notable designers and tastemakers who share Kaiyo’s love of all things pre-loved. “Our followers love getting the personal, inside scoop.”

Additionally, Kaiyo is encouraging its brand ambassadors to share on TikTok. That strategy is a mixture of design, secondhand, and sustainability content in the style that makes TikTok unique and addictive. Grace Baena, Kaiyo’s director of branded content has done an impressive job of giving the brand great social media context. It’s clear that the @getkaiyo TikTok effort invites a younger, Gen Z audience and Instagram skews toward a millennial consumer, which on trend.

Overall, Kaiyo appears to be meeting a need that blends the best of the furniture recommerce marketplace with the convenience of an end-to-end full-service offering.

Ikea, the retailer known for those gargantuan shopping emporiums out on the edge of town, is in the midst of a retail reinvention to rethink its footprint, experimenting with smaller stores in more urban locations. But it’s most certainly a work in progress.

With the recent announcement of the closing of its Queens, NY 115,000-square-foot store – giant by most measures but barely a fifth the size of most of its locations – Ikea continues to find its retail sweet spot that will reposition the home furnishings chain for its next generation.

It’s clearly not just about the meatballs.

Queens for a Day…Actually Two Years

Opened with great fanfare in January 2021 – delayed as so many things were by the Covid pandemic – the store in Queens was situated in the Rego Park shopping center and was a scaled down version of the signature 500,000-square-foot mothership model. It was designed to offer urban dwellers a nearby alternative to schlepping out to the ‘burbs to get their Ikea fix.

Ikea has moved on a number of fronts to be more online savvy. Over the past two years it has introduced a transactional app and developed a virtual escape room that it placed on Snapchat. Ikea is also stepping up its initiatives in the field of AI.

But only a few weeks ago Ikea told its faithful the store was closing in early December, saying it was due to “the changing needs of our customers.” The Robin Report asked for a little more explanation and this is what Ikea told us: “The Queens location is part of the first generation of small city stores for IKEA U.S., and we have many learnings that we will apply to our future locations. As we continuously test, explore, and develop our IKEA formats to meet our customers where they are, we will take learnings from each new customer meeting point that we open, so that we are constantly improving.”

Maybe something got lost in the translation from the original Swedish, but reading between the lines, we take this statement as simply, “It wasn’t working.” How much of that was due to the shifts in pandemic shopping patterns and how much to the wrong format in the wrong location is something we’ll probably never know. But taken with the 2020 closing of its year-old Manhattan Ikea Planning Studio, a small space on the Upper East Side that was all about custom kitchen cabinetry and pick-up and return services for other Ikea goods, it’s clear that the retailer is still trying to figure out the right formula for urban locations.

Selling in the City

Both New York City formats were part of the company’s plan to expand Ikea into inner city locations with different sizes and services. It has been moving in the same direction closer to home, in Europe, where it has opened dedicated stores for kitchens or closets or other categories. Last year, Javier Quinones, president and chief sustainability officer of Ikea Retail U.S., told The Robin Report that this three-tier format was the new plan going forward. He said Ikea had targeted four other markets besides New York — Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and the District of Columbia – and that each would get at least one of all three formats in the next three years.

The big stores will not disappear, he said. “They will continue to play a key role in offering the complete Ikea experience. We now have three different formats depending on what the customer wants, and every customer will have an Ikea touchpoint within 20 minutes of where they are. But we don’t talk about multi-channel, it’s all one channel.”

We asked Ikea for an update on the status of its small store plans, and they said, “Two small format stores have opened in London and one in Stockholm, Warsaw and Madrid. There is one in Canada with another planned in summer of 2023. We have also opened smaller IKEA stores in the heart of Paris and Moscow and have new locations coming to Rome and Tokyo. “In the U.S., we opened two new planning studios in Long Beach and Arcadia, CA, in August 2022. Additionally, we are working with our sister company, Ingka Centres, to create a new destination on Market Street in San Francisco, which will be anchored by a smaller format IKEA store.”

Google searches do not show any current small-format locations in Chicago, San Francisco or the District of Columbia. No New York City stores remain open besides a traditionally sized location in Brooklyn, but a recent report on the Queens closing on Timeout.com quoted the Commercial Observer that Ikea still planned on opening a Manhattan location “once it finds the right space to do so.”

Online On Target

Even as it continues to find the right mix for its physical stores, the retailer is putting more emphasis on ecommerce, once an afterthought for the company. Pre-Covid it accounted for about 15 percent of its U.S. sales but that has since shot up to 25 percent and Quinones said it could eventually be half of Ikea’s overall U.S. sales “but it will take time.”

In the meantime, Ikea has moved on a number of fronts to be more online savvy. Over the past two years it has introduced a transactional app and developed a virtual escape room that it placed on Snapchat. Ikea is also stepping up its initiatives in the field of AI. Barbara Martin Coppol, chief digital officer for the company said in an interview in 2020 with the British website Verdict, “Very soon we will give to people digitally the possibility of designing your home in photographic quality 3D from the comfort of your couch in a very simple way. So, you take a picture of your interior, and we will be able to swap in and out different furniture that you choose in order to really visualize how it will fit. All of that is part of new experiences online, and I think it’s really important to continue doing that in order to really visualize how it will fit.” Of course, view-in-room and image manipulation have become standard on many home furnishings sites, particularly at Wayfair which was an early pioneer but more recently at Williams Sonoma brands and other retailers. Ikea continues to play catch-up online, being late to the e-com party.

Not Your Same Old Meatball

With more than 50 stores in the U.S. and sales approaching $5 billion here, Ikea is generally considered to be the first or second largest seller of home furnishings products in the country, give or take Amazon and Wayfair. It is stepping up its approach to sustainability initiatives, recycling products and even providing assistance for inflation-impacted employees. For a retailer that had previously put such efforts not just on the back burner but on no burner at all, it’s a remarkable transformation, even if it is one with a few speed bumps. It’s not been afraid to move from its well-established status quo and there aren’t many retailers anywhere in the world that can say that.

Back in the day when Sears Roebuck was the biggest retailer in the world, they would sell you everything, from underwear and lawn mowers to entire automobiles and the house you lived in. And they would fix it too, operating the largest retail-based home repair service in the country at the time.

Now, with Sears long gone and the big DIY twins Home Depot and Lowe’s having taken over the home repair mantle, other national retailers like Walmart, Ikea and Ace Hardware stores are looking to get into the space. To go for the obvious, they are fixin’ to take some market share.

As spending on home repairs, remodeling and redecorating continues at historically high levels, these big box stores are coming to the conclusion that their potential for revenue doesn’t end when a shopper walks out the front door (or hits the buy button).

As spending on home repairs, remodeling and redecorating continues at historically high levels, these big box stores are concluding that their potential for revenue doesn’t end when a shopper walks out the front door (or hits the buy button). Now they want to connect you with third-party services that will install those products, do some household repairs and even undertake some serious home remodeling projects.

The DIY Twins

Home repair is a business that Home Depot and Lowe’s have largely had to themselves pretty much since the Sears slide began at least a decade ago. While that Sears home repair unit is still in business – and still owned by real estate savant Eddie Lampert – without the gateway the physical stores provided, the business must be just a shadow of its former self. And of course, there are thousands of local, and more than a few national operators, offering home repairs. But the lack of a connection to a home products retailer robs them of a natural point of entry. It’s why these new home repair services are so intriguing.

A few retailers have tiptoed around the service business. Best Buy’s Geek Squad is more about hooking up consumer electronics products, but they also do a brisk business in mounting those massive flat-panel TVs on living room and home theater walls.

Several home furnishings brands from what the industry calls the “lifestyle” side of the business have also ventured into this territory including retailers like RH, Crate & Barrel and the Williams Sonoma nameplates (Pottery Barn, West Elm, et. Al.) offering design services with furniture purchases. Traditional furniture retailers like Ethan Allen and regional chains have also been doing this for years. But a new generation of repair programs takes these efforts to a whole new level. And they are coming from multiple directions, industry channels and tiers.

Walmart Meets Angi

As the biggest retailer on the planet, when Walmart sneezes it’s a sound heard around the world. So, when the Boys from Bentonville announced earlier this year that they were hooking up with Angi, the independent home repair service that used to be known as Angie’s List, it got everyone’s attention. Walmart doesn’t provide the home repair service directly, they make the introduction to Angi’s independent contractors, presumably taking a nice little slice of the action. Services range from furniture assembly and TV wall-mounting all the way to flooring and painting — and are available from any of Walmart’s 4,000 stores. The new program is an expansion of a previous program the retailer had with a company called Handy, which Angi bought several years ago.

What’s the going rate on some of these repairs? Here are some initial quotes from Angi: TV wall mounting, $79; TV stand assembly, $79;  bed frame assembly, $59; and for you home workout freaks, treadmill assembly, $89.

When announcing the program, Walmart had no estimates on its potential size since pricing depends on the individual project. Nevertheless, with Walmart’s scale this is likely to be a big entry into the home repair sphere. And it should be noted that across the highway Target also offers some home services, like “large furniture assembly” through its tie-in with the third party Handy, although it’s not believed that program extends to household repairs such as Walmart is now offering.

Ace Ups the Ante

Ace Hardware, the independent retailer-owned franchiser hardware co-op, has taken the home repair business to an even higher level. In 2019 it bought Handyman Matters, a home repair, maintenance and improvement services franchiser. It subsequently renamed it Ace Handyman Services and began offering these services out of many of its more than 5,700 stores.

Ace owns the referral service, and it works with local, independent contractors to handle the multitude of home projects like plumbing, electrical, carpentry, flooring and painting for both residential and commercial locations. This model is similar to the Walmart program.

Ikea Puts It Together

Perhaps one of the more unlikely retailers to get into the home services sector is Ikea, long known for its bargain-priced (and oddly named) furniture that sometimes seems to require the skills of an MIT engineering graduate to assemble. The Swedish chain addressed this issue in 2017 when it bought third-party assembly service provider Task Rabbit, which it now operates as an independent service. Many customers probably don’t realize it is owned by Ikea.

Ikea has long been in the business of offering design and installation services to go along with its products, particularly in kitchen and bathroom design and even custom cabinetry done through third parties. If the retailer is still not offering hardcore home repairs like electrical and plumbing, it’s conceivable that they could do so down the road given Ikea’s continuing evolution into being more than just that big box out on the highway. Ikea’s moves into smaller urban and specialized locations, like its new Livat localized concept that just opened in London, clearly show that the company is expanding off its original base so expanding services is a logical next step.

A Good Fix

Estimates on the size of the total U.S. home repair market are all over the place, generally falling in a range from $235 billion a year all the way up to $317 billion. One industry estimate is that it will reach more than $585 billion by the end of the decade, and that seems quite plausible given all the attention Americans are giving to their homes these days, a trend that shows no signs of letting up so far.

The home maintenance space is a lucrative one and could be a substantial growth area for these retailers. American Home Insurance tells homeowners they should budget about $1 for every square foot of livable space, every year, for annual home maintenance costs. That means a typical 2,500-square-foot home would require a $2,500 budget annually, or about $209 per month. With more than 110 million households in America, you do the math…though it’s likely retailers such as Walmart, Ace and Ikea have already done so.

And if you’re saying to yourselves how in the world did Sears ever lose this business…well, you’ll have to stand in line with all the people asking that question these days. At last count, there were just 22 Sears full-line stores left in the country.

Talk about a place that could have used some major repairs.