Who sells the most popular lamp in America? As you wrack your brain trying to guess if it’s Visual Comfort, Ikea or RH, I’ll wager a guess at one name that didn’t spring to mind: Aooshine. Aooshine is the brand behind the very first result in a recent Amazon search for “lamp.” It has no website, no active social channels, and a minimal Google footprint—yet according to Amazon’s listing, the product in question, a bedside table lamp that retails for $9.48, has sold over 10,000 units in the past month.
Aooshine’s neighbors on that critical first page of Amazon search results? Fenmzee, Luckystyle, Govee, Ambimall and Zjojo, all of which have sold thousands of their fixtures over the past month. These are not brands that most, if any, consumers will recognize. Yet by one crucial metric—online sales—they’re killing it.
What are these wackily named companies, exactly? One of the challenges of e-commerce is that it can be difficult to know what you’re looking at, or what to trust. On its website, for example, Fenmzee says that it was founded by three interior designers. However, they’re not named; the site is riddled with typos; and a little Google sleuthing shows that the brand name is a registered trademark of what appears to be a Chinese manufacturing company—as is Aooshine.
It’s impossible to paint all of these companies, from Ambimall to Zjojo, with the same exact brush. But it’s fair to say that many of them are the result of a phenomenon that’s been on the rise in recent years: overseas factories selling direct to American consumers online, no middleman required.
It’s worth noting that one search for “lamp” doesn’t define a marketplace. There are plenty of U.S.–based lighting brands listed on Amazon. Likewise, these so-called “pseudo-brands” (gibberish names allow manufacturers to breeze through trademark registration) are far more prevalent on Amazon than fellow home e-commerce giants Wayfair, Home Depot and Lowe’s. And for a little perspective, e-commerce is only one slice of the overall market for home goods, which is still a stubbornly IRL category.
Yet it’s hard to deny that this phenomenon has been a hot topic in the home industry lately—a much-discussed subject at happy hours at the major furniture markets this year. “You hear this constantly, the idea that there are overseas factories pushing their product into America,” says Bo Stump, an advisor for M&A firm Stump & Company and a close industry watcher. “It’s quite a complicated situation.”
The issue even bubbled up into a recent Wayfair earnings call, when an analyst asked CEO Niraj Shah about concerns that the platform had been flooded with factory-direct sellers, angering U.S. importers. Shah deftly parried the question, but he didn’t exactly deny that the phenomenon exists. There’s clearly something there. But what does it matter for designers?
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
There’s an irony to the idea that Asian suppliers are a charged topic in the industry. Ever since the 1980s, when globalization began in earnest, China has been making more and more of the products we put in our homes. There is nothing new about the concept of furniture and decor being manufactured in Asia.
What is new is how it arrives on American soil. For years (decades, really) there was an implicit bargain to globalized production. Asian factories would produce the goods, while American companies would design them, import them, store them in warehouses and deliver them to Western consumers. In its earliest days, this arrangement itself was disruptive—it devastated American manufacturing communities—but it created a new stability. Even if overseas factories had wanted to cut out the middleman, there was no simple way to do it throughout most of the 1990s and 2000s. “The infrastructure just wasn’t there,” says Stump.
It’s hard to pinpoint when exactly that equilibrium shifted, but by the 2010s, a combination of technological, political and economic factors began to shake up the order of things.
For one, e-commerce itself began to get a lot more sophisticated. It’s easy to think of Wayfair and Amazon as always being the giants they are, but in the 2000s, e-commerce was undeveloped, especially for home goods. Shopping online was still a novelty, and Shah was a fixture at High Point Market, trying to convince importers to sign up to sell on Wayfair.
That began to change as consumers embraced e-commerce in earnest. What had once been a somewhat clunky mechanism to ship cheap, lightweight goods around the world began to develop into a robust ecosystem. Amazon developed its FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) program and began courting Chinese factories to sell through its U.S.–based distribution system. Meanwhile, Wayfair was building its own network, allowing sellers to tap into a ready-made warehousing and logistics system, while startups like GigaCloud offered an independent version of the same basic idea.
Before, it would have taken years of relationship building and intricate negotiations to sell into the U.S. marketplace. Tech advancements made it as easy as the click of a few buttons.
“The technology and logistics platforms and retail marketplaces that exist now all make it easier for [overseas suppliers] to sell direct,” says Josh Walter, the CEO and co-founder of BrandJump, an agency that specializes in helping home furnishings manufacturers build a presence on e-commerce marketplaces. “There’s FBA, there’s GigaCloud and many others—all tools that allow you to essentially create accounts and sell direct to U.S. consumers. There’s so much more to enable that than there once was.”
Then in 2018, there was a political twist, as the Trump administration unveiled a series of tariffs on Chinese goods. These created a challenge for importers, many of whom had to raise their own prices to account for the new cost—as a result, they sold fewer goods, and the factories began to take a hit too. Some were able to relocate to countries like Vietnam and Mexico to avoid the tariffs. But many of those same factories, newly able to sell direct, suddenly needed to do so in order to maintain their volume.
Then, when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the bottom fell out of the market for furniture and decor. The pandemic home boom was over, and American consumers were done spending wildly on their homes. Price became the most important factor, and factories selling direct were perfectly positioned to offer the cheapest goods on everything from rugs to sofas and lamps.
“Price matters a lot right now, much more than it did a few years ago,” says Walter. “[Keeping prices low] is probably working for Chinese suppliers right now better than it has in the past, because our industry is in a place where consumers—if they’re going to buy home products at all—are probably trading down.”
Through a combination of technological, geopolitical and macroeconomic change, Asian factories have found themselves perfectly positioned to dominate the e-commerce landscape. While a recognizable brand name once may have been crucial to move units on sites like Amazon, now all it takes is the cheapest price on a bedside lamp, which helps explain the rise of a brand like Aooshine. Who cares if you’ve never heard of it? In the cutthroat landscape of 2024, being 35 cents cheaper than the next listing is often what matters most.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
Unsurprisingly, the players most frustrated by the shifting marketplace are U.S.–based importers—the companies that built a business on manufacturing in Asia and facilitating the sale stateside. These brands have seen some of their advantage erode as factories have figured out how to sell direct to consumers at a microscopic price—hence the grumblings at High Point Market and Las Vegas Market.
The agita against these manufacturers—and the e-commerce marketplaces that enable them to reach U.S. consumers—can spiral into a grab bag of complaints, and off the record, importers will float a variety of theories, some more conspiratorial than others. For example, it is true that the Chinese government has subsidized its manufacturing industries, meaning that some factories are able to produce and “dump” some merchandise into the U.S. market at below-market rates. It’s also true that some Chinese nationals, looking to park their money in the U.S. away from the watchful eye of their government, will establish American shell companies towards the purpose of converting their money from yuan into dollars.
However, it’s impossible to say whether either of those phenomena are truly behind any one specific $9.48 bedside lamp. For decades, American importers have been looking for ways to protect their margins on furniture and decor. Now the factories that make the goods are looking to preserve their own margins, while marketplaces are looking to give consumers what they want: low prices. Can anyone blame them?
For designers, it’s hard to argue that a marketplace flooded with cheap product is a good thing. While most clients aren’t directly comparing Apparatus fixtures to Aooshine lamps, the ultracheap goods now available online inevitably have an effect on how consumers see the value of home goods. It’s harder to convince clients that a $10,000 chandelier is worth it when a look-alike product is available on Amazon for $100.
While it may seem like factory-direct goods have irrevocably altered the landscape, the reality is more complicated. Companies that sell for crazy-cheap prices online are able to do so largely because they forgo a lot of the services that U.S. importers provide—things like innovative design, customer service and quality control (the online reviews on “pseudo brands” can be brutal). “I don’t see it as a threat,” says Satya Tiwari, the CEO of Surya. “This has been going on for a while, and there’s a lot more to the sauce than just putting product on a marketplace.”
At the moment, when it comes to home goods, a low price tag is often what gets a brand to the top of e-commerce searches. But when the post-boom collapse levels out, consumers will likely refocus on quality and service. When that happens, online marketplaces may pay a price for over-indexing on cheap goods, and brands like Aooshine may fade away as quickly as they arrived.
