It’s not often that a major new retail concept debuts, and it’s even more rare when the first location is just a 15 minute drive from my house. However, that is what happened in May when Wayfair opened their first non-clearance brick & mortar location in the Chicago North Shore suburb of Wilmette.

For those who are unfamiliar with the brand, Wayfair is the leading online retailer of furniture and home décor. The company grew to $12 billion in revenue but has seen sales flatten since the pandemic home spending cycle ended.

As shopping center owners, we often purchase assets in places we don’t live. We lease these centers from remote locations and our relationships to the community are tenuous at best. While the nature of large scale shopping centers means there will always be a greater focus on national and regional chains and a demand for higher rents, as an industry we could all probably do a better job of finding out what makes each community unique and scaling our plans to make each asset at least somewhat tailored to local interests.

The pivot to physical retail comes after years of planning and Wayfair hopes it will launch the company into a new era where it becomes a top tier destination across a wide variety of income brackets.

The Wilmette store is in a 150,000 square foot former Lord & Taylor department store box. The exterior of the store was renovated with plenty of windows letting in natural light that helps better highlight how furniture might look in someone’s home. The store also includes a café with healthy dining options, home appliances, lighting fixtures, pet furniture, mattresses, candles, and just about anything else you’d want to put in or around your house.

One feature that we loved was the plumbing section where you could try out roughly 3 dozen different faucets and a shower wall that showed the spraying styles of a variety of shower heads. It’s an interactive an experiential element that was drawing the most crowds of any part of the store. Speaking of crowds, the store was packed on a rainy summer Sunday afternoon, so much so that it may have been hard to locate someone to help with any larger purchases. In addition, it could be hard to differentiate between sections that were more showroom-like and those more like a traditional retail store. We were interested in buying a new garbage can, but the one we liked was not on the shelves.

Ultimately, we didn’t buy anything on the trip, but we did get several ideas for new bedroom furniture for our daughter and bought a new bed and dresser from the Wayfair website a week later.  In that sense, the store created an incremental sale as we likely would have ended up at a more traditional furniture store had we not made the trip to Wayfair.

Overall, the store reminded me of a cross between an Ikea and the now defunct Great Indoors (a Sears concept from the late 1990s). Whether Wayfair ends up more like the former or the latter will likely depend on how they are able to leverage the strengths of this initial rollout while addressing the (admittedly few) missteps.

Mike Jordan