In 1995, TJX—then the recent successor to regional discount chain Zayre—made what seemed to be an odd, perhaps even redundant, move: It bought Marshalls from the onetime retail conglomerate Melville. It already had T.J. Maxx—did it really need two very similar retail operations?

It turns out TJX knew exactly what it was doing. By running the two brands in tandem, it was able to command a market share twice the size in the off-price channel and double up on its presence in retail centers and neighborhoods. Today, with the buying power of 5,000 stores in nine different countries behind it, TJX dominates the discount retail world in a way it never could have with just a single flagship brand.

That’s what is now going on with its two home-specific brands, HomeGoods and Homesense. And with no direct competitors (like its apparel brands have with Ross and Burlington in the fashion space), TJX is poised to take even more market share in categories like furniture, decor and home textiles.

TJX’s plans for its home business have become even clearer in the past few months. As it starts to max out (pun intended) on the number of units it plans to operate for Maxx (1,400 in the United States, and more than 750 around the world) and Marshalls (1,255 in the U.S.), the company sees its biggest growth coming in home.

It currently operates 963 HomeGoods stores across the country, which is almost double the count from a decade ago. More importantly, while it once projected that 1,000 would be the ceiling on the number of locations, it has since upped that count—first to 1,500, and then recently to 1,800. And none of this takes into account the home business it has always done at T.J. Maxx and Marshalls. It’s only a small space within the typical location for these two nameplates, but you multiply that by more than 3,000 stores and it becomes a pretty big number.

Between HomeGoods and Homesense, TJX says about $10 billion—or around 18 percent of its overall 2025 volume of $56 billion—comes from what it calls “home fashions,” but doesn’t break out its sales by brand within the category. And its e-commerce business remains a rounding error for the overall company as it continues to believe its in-store model does not easily translate to online.

With an eventual cap on its HomeGoods division—the company does not say when the 1,800-store target will be reached—TJX executives are already focused on what’s next. While it owns the small active sportswear retail brand Sierra and says it will continue international expansion, it needs a physical store workhorse—and that’s Homesense.

At first appearance, it is a döppelganger to its sister brand: an off-price format largely located in shopping centers and devoted to a rapidly changing assortment of home furnishings, with an aggressive pricing strategy that sometimes is more sizzle than substance.

But a closer inspection of its merchandising mix shows that it is clearly more furniture-centric than HomeGoods. Walking through its stores, you’ll see more floor space dedicated to the category, as well as living, dining and bedroom case goods that the other doesn’t touch. All of that is exactly why the brand poses a significantly larger threat to furniture retailers.

Right now, there are only about 80 Homesense stores in the U.S. (not to be confused with the Canadian division of the same name, which has a merchandising mix closer to HomeGoods’s), and TJX says it will only be opening a handful in 2026, with no grand pronouncements on its target number.

Curiously, soon after the company launched Homesense in the States in 2017, it told analysts on a quarterly earnings call it would have more than 400 locations, although it did not provide a timetable for the rollout. Since then it has not said much about its long-term plans for the brand.

But if you follow along on the T.J. Maxx–Marshalls model, it makes sense that the company will pursue a similar strategy for its two home brands. And while their merchandise mixes are not identical—Homesense skews more towards furniture and larger decor while HomeGoods is heavier into textiles, housewares and tabletop—the two nameplates could most certainly coexist and feed off each other exactly as their apparel siblings do.

So imagine this: $30 billion in annual retail home furnishings sales between the two brands, perhaps in no more than a decade, making them the biggest retailers of home furnishings products in the country. And in a marketplace that, while not quite flat, is not growing exponentially. Right now, retailers in this space who are worried about their competitors talk about Amazon, Wayfair, maybe Walmart, or perhaps Ikea. Those are rivals to be concerned about to be sure. But what TJX is building with HomeGoods and Homesense promises to be the biggest threat ever to conventional home furnishings retailers, proving two heads are better than one.