Here's Why Fashion Brands & Retailers Are Moving Into Homeware Right Now

On December 3rd 2020, just before one of the biggest shopping holidays of the year, Canadian luxury retailer SSENSE sent out an email to its mailing list subscribers alerting them to a new section of the website. Not a new product – not even a new, need-to-know brand – but an entirely new shopping category. Fittingly – and in true, unmistakably irreverent SSENSE style – dubbed EVERYTHING ELSE.

Described in the email as “a new department that spans homeware, technology, activity, petwear – and,” you guessed it, “everything else,” the unveiling of the new section was, in many ways, a fitting way to end a year unlike anything most of us can remember. Not because the announcement was particularly shocking but rather because the reveal made perfect sense. It was, you might say, more-or-less inevitable.

To paraphrase Tennessee Williams, SSENSE customers have had this date with homeware from the beginning – or at the very least, since the start of the pandemic. After all, what seems like a more sure-fire business decision than fully diversifying into homeware when so much of your consumer base is, quite literally, confined to their homes? A captive audience in the truest sense of the phrase.

But the SSENSE announcement was really just one small thread of a broader, more intricately woven tapestry of micro and macro trends – an effect, rather than a cause. The retailer – and they’re certainly not alone in this, both MATCHESFASHION and END. have notably well-stocked lifestyle sections – chose to step up their homeware game not because they were anticipating some great change in the habits of their audience, but because they’d noticed the same boom in that market which the rest of us had also seen.

The only difference being that, for those of us not studying the sales figures and trend reports, this came in the form of an onslaught of Instagram posts – a near-endless stream of images featuring candles of all shapes and sizes, high-end incense holders, and a veritable wave of ceramics.

It’s no coincidence that, in 2020 – a year which has been dubbed, far too often and with far too little self-awareness – the “Year of the Shelfie,” that products which sit on the shelves of consumers, rather than languishing idly in their wardrobes, have been pushed to the foreground for retailers which previously considered them to ephemeral.

Of course, the retailers wouldn't be stocking anything if the people-at-large weren’t already buying what the brands themselves were producing; supply and demand, you know?

Labels known for their homewares and their hollowares – for their beguiling esoterica and decorative objet – have doubled down on this facet of their business, but names which are less traditionally associated with this particular corner of the market have (correctly) assessed the situation and decided to make their move, too: consider Japanese brand Wacko Maria’s Brian Fantana-endorsed incense holder, British eyewear brand A BETTER FEELING’s “GINKGO” candle, and Milan-based-but-California-inspired Palm Angels’ logo-embroidered teddy bear and you have a clear snapshot of a trend seemingly unencumbered by the particulars of geography.

Now, of course, with a skeptics eye this would be easy to attribute purely to the knock-on effects of the pandemic: that high-end aroma-peddler Diptyque alone saw sales of scented candles grow by 536% in the weeks immediately following the U.K.’s initial Covid-19 lockdown should give us pause for thought. After all, increases like this can’t possibly be sustained over time – these kinds of bubbles, we know all too well, have to burst eventually. And, what’s more, it’s not like we’ve been given many good reasons not to be skeptical over this last year.

And yet, while this crisis may have caused an unexpectedly sharp peaking of homeware sales and a renewed sense of vigour in terms of production speed from some corners, it isn’t a trend which began in 2020 at all. Or, for that matter, one which is likely to die out in 2021.

You see, as early as 2018, well-respected publications like the Business Of Fashion were already reporting on the ways in which major online retailers were “dipping their toes into the $649 billion homeware space, betting the same customers splurging on dresses and shoes will also buy candles and chairs.” Even this, as BoF also notes, wasn’t the beginning: “Fendi, Ralph Lauren and Giorgio Armani have long sold homewares,” the article notes, then pointing out that “Gucci and Loewe, however, only launched their collections in 2017.”

We are, then, into the fourth year of this luxury homeware uptick at the very least. And that’s a conservative estimate presuming that things only really started picking up as late as 2017.

There are plenty of possible reasons for this, of course. And the one which sticks out as having a particularly strong effect is the same one which suggests that, while there may well be a post-pandemic slowdown in the purchasing of luxury homeware, it’s a market which will continue to thrive for the foreseeable future.

That reason? Property. Or, rather, lack of it.

That millennials have either shied away from or been locked out of home ownership by a prohibitive marketplace – one that favours a kind of archaic stability which people can no longer expect to just have in their lives as a matter of course – is well-trodden ground. That the effect is more long-term renting, a shift toward more nomadic lifestyles, and a more precarious sense of living is more or less self-evident. Look at the people around you: how many own their home? How many even talk about wanting to anymore?

What is perhaps less obvious, though, is the knock-on effect that this trend has on the homeware market. That young people, who aren’t able to make tangible changes to the place that they live because they don’t actually own it, should want to make more transient, joyful upgrades to their home makes perfect sense.

If you can’t even paint your walls, get a lamp. If you can’t put up a wall shelf, buy a sculptural candle or bear figurine instead. What else can you do?

As Jack Stanley rightly points out on HYPEBEAST, too, that this is a kind of make-do-and-accessorise solution doesn’t mean it has to feel like one: these purchases don’t need to feel bleak, and trends toward more joyful homeware products is a testament to this. “As people looked for more fulfillment from their own spaces, they began, too, to embrace a new spirit of fun and playfulness in design,” Stanley writes, “a rejection of what has come before: in particular, the prevalence of minimalism as the dominant aesthetic.”

Sydney Gore, freelance writer and New York-based decor oracle (decoracle?), sees converging factors at play – including the inevitable mental health aspect of ongoing confinement to a single set of walls: “For some of us, staying home all day is a dream. For others, it’s been a complete nightmare,” she explains, “But in general, I think that this whole experience has been an awakening that pushed many of us to face the internal issues that we often avoided with external distractions. If you weren’t happy with your living situation before quarantine, now you have this indefinite amount of time to make real, tangible changes.”

In this sense, Gore explains, it’s understandable that we’re all “desperate to feel a sense of control during a period where the future is uncertain so redirecting that energy toward our surroundings is the most natural reaction as we transition to a life indoors. Not everyone has the ability to pack up their apartment and relocate somewhere else, but redecorating isn’t out of bounds—or out of budget depending on where you look.”

Swapping the trappings of Going Out for those of staying in, Gore notes: “Over the past year, me and most of my friends have cut back on shopping for excessive things like clothes, shoes, and accessories in lieu of homeware. (They’re called home goods for a reason… These items make you feel good!) We can no longer deny that we share this unfulfilled desire to be home owners instead of renters. Until then, we’re looking to invest in the statement pieces that will define our not-so-distant futures.”

Little seems for sure right now, but it seems unlikely that Gen Z will find a sense of stability in life and in the property market of the kind that has so eluded their millennial predecessors. At least, not any time soon. Until that happens, we can expect more designers to shift into homeware – more luxury, high-end and streetwear retailers to find themselves selling candles and incense holders and abstract sculptures.

This may well turn out to be the age, not the year, of the shelfie.