Remember when used furniture and home furnishings products were…well, used? They tended to be looked down on and were only purchased as a last resort when budgets and life circumstances precluded buying new.
Well, along with so many things that concept has evolved and now many consumers have come to accept -- even welcome -- buying second-hand, “lightly used” products for their homes. First seen in the apparel business where online sites like Renttherunway, Farfetch, TheRealReal and Poshmark have made buying used products more common, so too has it started showing up in home.
Some of this is from existing apparel websites with Poshmark and TheRealReal both expanding into home. Traditional home furnishings retailers like Ikea, Pottery Barn and Coyuchi all offer programs to buy back their products, refurbish them and then resell them (although the Ikea program has not yet been introduced in the U.S.).
All of these are in addition to furnishing rental programs from a variety of startups, including Fernish, Feather and ZZ Driggs. Of course renting furniture has been around for decades and companies like Aarons have built significant retail businesses around the concept.
But now a new twist on all of this has emerged with the debut of a buyback program from a two-year-old furniture startup called Sabai. The company, beginning last month, buys back its sofas and then resells them at a discount. Consumers get 15% of the secondhand sale price in cash or can take a 20% discount on a new purchase of their own. “The idea is to create an entirely closed loop system that keeps the sofas out of landfills for good,” Sabai’s cofounder Phantila Phataraprasit told Fast Company magazine.
Sustainability as an issue in home furnishings is just starting to gain traction throughout the industry. One source estimates that 12 million tons of home products end up in landfills and garbage dumps every year.
Of course, this is mostly upholstered and wood and metal furniture rather than home décor items like lighting, wall art and such which may have their own issues on resale. But as an initial foray into the idea, these programs hold out the promise of a new business model for the entire home furnishings business. Used products are now commonplace in fashion and have always been a part of the automotive sales industry. So why not home furnishings?