Top Furniture Trends of 2023 & 2022

This furniture trend is, surprisingly, driven by the software industry. The average American spends 5 hours every day watching TV and, as streaming takes off, content goes from statically on the wall to being portable on laptops, tablets, and phones.

While the bedroom used to be predominalty for sleeping, sex and reading, consumers are increasingly spending time in their bedrooms watching TV, on social media, or playing games. And bed frames with headboards make it easier to stare at a screen for a longer period of time. In fact, as the streaming wars started heating up in the late 2000’s, searches and discussion around bed frames with headboards also started seeing an inflection.

Many other trends we’ve featured play into this one: blue light blocking glasses, which have grown 300% since we featured them 1.5 years ago, help consumers spend more time in front of screens before bed and avoid the effects of the blue light on their sleep. Even wedge pillows, whose popularity has doubled over the past year, are sometimes listed for sale with photos of models holding phones above their heads while laying on the pillow. Rising demand for posture correctors as well, is often cited as a response to too many hours staring at screens, hunched over or in bed.

Bed frames with headboards have been growing for years but were strongly accelerated by the pandemic. When it first hit, investors expected something like a typical recession, where spending drops fastest for durable, discretionary purchases like furniture. As a result, Wayfair’s stock price dropped from $93 at the start of the year to $21 per share at the low in March. Since then, it’s become apparent that the pandemic set off an unprecedented furniture-buying spree, and Wayfair’s stock is up over 12x since the low.

When the offerings in the floor-level bed frame category started to look too out-of-date, consumers who wouldn’t settle went as far as to buy normal bed frames that fit their aesthetic then saw off the legs to make them floor-level. Many buyers had to resort to this DIY approach as an indirect result of furniture economics: since shipping is so expensive, companies standardize, and that means sometimes missing out on niche markets.

And as floor-level bed frames are becoming more popular as a result of growing interest in Montessori, growing demand is centered around the term “montessori bed”. Like keto bread and beauty fridges, it’s a way to rebrand an existing product and charge more for it—in this case, literally charging more for less, since a Montessori bed uses less material than a standard bed.

The Montessori method recommends low-placed beds for a few reasons: aside from the safety benefit of preventing falls, a low-placed bed makes it easier for kids to get into and out of bed without help from adults, leading to greater independence.

Montessori as a childcare trend has been beneficial for sellers of toys, puzzles, and other children's products because one element of it is rotating toy availability. As kids mature, some of their more basic toys get put away, while other toys come into and out of their room to keep them interested. This helps keep toy spending per child high, while the practice of keeping toys out of rotation reduces clutter. Since a cluttered room can inhibit spending even if the toys aren't especially fun any more, Montessori is able to both create demand for new spending and remove an obstacle to it.

The furniture industry has been around for so long that most of the new developments are spurred by changes outside of furnishings. Bed frames with headboards, for example, have gotten more popular as the bed increasingly becomes a place to consume media or work on a laptop.

Entryway cabinets are growing, in part, for similar reasons: For one, the proliferation of voice-controlled devices for home control means consumers are placing these devices near their front doors, often alongside the increasingly common front door smart security systems.

Entryways are also the point of transition from the outside world to being at home and, as phones become more addictive, some consumers increasingly report leaving them at the door, a way to pre-commit to a less screen-mediated experience at home. It’s one of many growing solutions to distraction, from time-tracking apps to technology sabbaths to keeping devices in do-not-disturb mode or in grayscale mode.

Normally, there’s a tradeoff between the enjoyment and social clout of nice home furnishings and the worry that they’ll get damaged. Ruggable means that a spilled drink doesn’t stop the party, and that a muddy dog doesn’t ruin the centerpiece of the living room.

Rugs are notoriously difficult to clean, and they’re often bigger than a home washing machine can handle. So a stained rug tends to get relegated to a less-used room, or thrown away altogether. Ruggable is a direct-to-consumer company that offers a two-piece rug; the top can be detached and washed separately from the rest, making it much more convenient to clean.

This focus on stain-proofing gives ruggable a chance to lean in to one of the strongest trends in social media: posts with cute pets or cute babies get clicks. Since pets and kids are two major sources of stains, it’s entirely legitimate that Ruggable’s 1.2M-follower strong Instagram account features plenty of dogs, cats, and tots.

Ruggable benefited from another external shift: direct-to-consumer mattress companies and furniture sites like Wayfair have normalized the practice of ordering home decor without seeing it in person first. Ruggable has also gotten a tailwind from the pandemic. In a normal year, over 30 million people move, but the pandemic led to a faster pace of relocation. When people move, they’re less likely to bring bulky, relatively low-value items like old rugs with them; Ruggable advertises accordingly, and one of their site’s top referrers is realtor.com

Furniture took longer than most categories to start selling online because of its bulk. In fact, many furniture products were redesigned from the ground up in order to cost-effectively fit into ecommerce logistics flows. Mattresses were made from highly-compressible foam rather than spring coils and tables were built differently so they fit into postal packages rather than bulk container packaging.

But just because they could be shipped, it doesn’t mean they could be returned. Mattress companies use industrial-grade hydraulic presses to flatten mattresses down to inch-thick sheets, removing all the air, then using industrial-grade rollers to roll the sheet so it fits in a box. Needless to say, it’d be impossible for a customer to fit the mattress back into the box to return it.

So rather than actually taking back the oversized products when customers want a return, these brands simply auction off the return to other companies that will pick up and sell the oversized items on sites like Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace, then split the earnings with the brand. In fact, many of the top mattress brands, Purple and Casper included, use a company called Sharetown that orchestrates all this.

Companies like Sharetown have gotten brands comfortable with this approach by reasoning that it doesn’t compete with new sales, as the consumers who buy used mattresses often are not the same as those who are willing to pay full price. Instead of competing against themselves, it actually – Sharetown claims – lets them reach a whole separate audience who they otherwise could not access.

Now, as warehouses fill up with already-assembled furniture with nowhere to go, consumers are increasingly aware and on the prowl, buying returned furniture often at up to 70% discounts.

Thousands of side hustlers are discovering a fascinating arbitrage: There’s a ton of consumer demand for black furniture and white furniture, but much of the supply on secondhand sites like Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace is furniture of other colors.

In fact, searches for “black table” and “white table” sum to more than twice the total of all other color tables.

By finding these other-colored pieces that aren’t selling, buying them for close to nothing, then applying a quick black or white paint job, they’re able to flip furniture quickly and sometimes even make a full-time living: it’s a fascinating arbitrage simply around color.

There’s also been a rise in the second-hand furniture market, in part due to the rise of “fast furniture”. Like fast fashion, retailers are selling lower-quality and lower-priced furniture that isn’t worth disassembling when moving. Such low-quality that they also get easily beat up in a U-Haul, so they’re often left on the street before the move. In fact, Americans throw away over 12 million tons of furniture each year, up 4.5X from 1960, according to the EPA.

Meanwhile, Reddit's /r/flipping community is in the top 1% of subreddits in terms of size, with almost a quarter of a million members – some of whom have quit their jobs and gone full-time. Some even go so far as to temporarily relocate to college towns where students are regularly moving in and out.