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retail watch | Jun 26, 2025 |
Parachute pulls back on retail stores, following a DTC trend

When the direct-to-consumer model was born more than a decade ago, the basic concept was that brands would go straight to the everyday shopper online, bypassing traditional retailers. It hasn’t quite worked out that way.

Parachute Home, the upscale bed and bath textiles seller founded in 2014, has become only the latest brand to find out that adding physical retail locations to direct selling—a strategy pursued by virtually every DTC player out there—is a lot harder than it looks. The company just announced that over the past year it has quietly closed nearly three-quarters of its store fleet, a tacit retreat to selling direct. At the same time, Parachute has been pursuing deals with the very companies the DTC movement planned to show up: conventional retailers like Nordstrom and Target.

“We opened stores that were too large or in regions where brand awareness wasn’t as high as it needed to be,” CEO Mehdi Ait Oufkir told Business Insider. He confirmed that Parachute has closed 19 of its 26 retail locations, pulling back on the strategy that saw the launch of its first store in Los Angeles in 2016 and a steady stream of new openings through its most recent outpost, a flagship in New York’s Flatiron district in 2023.

In a statement provided to Business of Home, Ait Oufkir tied the retail retreat to Parachute’s now-halted experiments with expanding its furniture offering. “We learned a lot in our first attempt at furniture,” he says. “We were optimistic about that category and invested in large retail footprints to support it, but our consumer wasn’t looking to us for furniture, or at least not on the timeline we expected. It was still a worthy challenge to pursue.”

Parachute is not alone in moving away from operating stores and toward third-party distribution. Casper, the bed-in-a-box pioneer, exploded on the scene in the mid-teens with plans to have as many as 200 stores and expand its basic mattress assortment into bedding, lighting and good-sleep gadgets. It never even made it to the halfway mark, all while in the process of going public, going private, nearly going bankrupt, and eventually being sold to Carpenter, the big foam and materials supplier, last year.

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Casper does still operate about 65 stores and sells direct, but its primary focus is on distribution through other retailers, along with a very long list of the usual suspects in the bedding sector.

Other brands both in and out of the home sector have struggled with operating stores. Mattress supplier Purple has downplayed its store strategy and focused on third-party distribution, especially Mattress Firm. Allbirds, the sustainable footwear brand, has closed about 25 percent of its 58 locations; and Outdoor Voices, an activewear label, closed all 16 of its stores last year.

Still, some DTC brands are making physical locations work. Warby Parker, practically the poster child for the business model, has over 275 stores and now gets the majority of its revenue from this channel.

Boll & Branch, another upscale bed and bath textiles brand, has moved slowly into physical retail and now operates 12 locations, having just opened stores in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida; Fairfax, Virginia; and Birmingham, Alabama. But the brand also has a substantial business through traditional retailers like Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s. Another player in the space, Brooklinen, has also moved slowly on the store front, now operating eight locations. But it said in 2022 it planned to have as many as 30 locations by the end of last year, which seems to indicate it rethought its physical expansion along the way.

And Joybird—a furniture brand that started out as direct-to-consumer and is now owned by La-Z-Boy—just opened its 13th store in the upscale South Coast Collection center in Orange County, California.

So, stores are not necessarily a universally terrible idea for DTC brands: Some are making it work even as others are moving to different business models. “We’re optimizing to find the perfect combination of wholesale, e-commerce and retail,” Ait Oufkir tells BOH. “It’s a critical part of running our type of business before we think about the next chapter for Parachute.”

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Warren Shoulberg is the former editor in chief for several leading B2B publications. He has been a guest lecturer at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business; received honors from the International Furnishings and Design Association and the Fashion Institute of Technology; and been cited by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and other media as a leading industry expert. His Retail Watch columns offer deep industry insights on major markets and product categories.

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