Dive Brief:
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Canada-based DTC furniture brand Article is set to open its first two U.S. brick-and-mortar stores, in San Francisco and Bellevue, Washington, by the end of 2026, the company said on Thursday.
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Each store will feature between 7,500 and 8,200 square feet of retail space, and the company said West Coast locations were chosen “based on historically strong e-commerce performance as part of a strategy to build on its existing customer base.”
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Article opened its first physical store in Vancouver, British Columbia, in August 2024, where in-store average order values surpassed online orders by more than 20%, the company said in March. A second Canada location, in Toronto, is scheduled to open in late 2026.
Dive Insight:
The U.S. is Article's largest customer base, with a March story in The Globe and Mail reporting that U.S. sales account for 80% of Article’s revenue. In addition, the company said California and Washington were among its top five states in terms of e-commerce performance.
“We see physical retail as an extension of the business we built online and are approaching expansion with discipline," Aamir Baig, Article’s co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. “The West Coast has always been core to our business and represents roughly a quarter of total purchases. It's where our company is headquartered and where we built early infrastructure to support customer demand.”
Baig added that expanding Article’s retail footprint to California and Washington “is a natural next step.”
Article’s San Francisco store will be in the city’s Design District, while its Bellevue location will be inside the Bellevue Collection, an upscale mall outside of downtown Seattle. Both locations will offer free interior design services and feature retail vignettes and swatch libraries.
The company said additional stores are coming, with up to five store locations planned by early 2027, including the Vancouver and Toronto stores.
The expansion follows a roller coaster period in the company’s 13-year history, which saw its fortunes rise and fall in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In March 2022, Article announced a 45% year-over-year revenue increase and said it had been profitable since 2015. However, only five months later, the company laid off 216 people, accounting for 17% of its staff, with Baig telling workers the e-commerce business had benefited from COVID-era demand, and had subsequently misjudged how long that trend would last.
“As a result, our financial projections showed that we were operating the business at a size larger than current demand would sustain,” Baig said in a statement. “Put simply, we were living beyond our means. I needed to resize our business to restore our position of financial strength.”
Baig told The Globe and Mail in March that the rightsizing worked, and that Article became profitable again in 2024, albeit with a more streamlined staff of about 500 workers, down from the 1,300 employees it had in 2022.
Article isn’t the only furniture company that faltered post-COVID. The entire sector took a tumble following a pandemic surge, and the current confluence of a depressed U.S. housing market, decreased discretionary spending and fluctuating tariff policies has led analysts to predict continuing struggles for home furnishings stores in 2026.
Nonetheless, a few companies are progressing. Those include Bob’s Discount Furniture, which just reported 8.5% first-quarter revenue growth; Ikea, which is in the process of expanding its U.S. retail footprint; and Wayfair, another digitally native brand that’s gaining market share and opening its own brick-and-mortar locations.
