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retail watch | Jun 5, 2025 |
Wayfair’s first large-format store was a hit. Now it’s planning new locations

On the heels of celebrating the one-year anniversary of its first large-format store, a 150,000-square-foot Chicagoland flagship, Wayfair has announced its next two physical locations, which will open in rapid succession and signal a stepped-up effort by the company to bring stores into its business model.

The next two Wayfair full-line stores—opening in Atlanta next year and then Yonkers (just north of Manhattan in Westchester County) in 2027—will take some of the learnings from the first location, the Chicago suburb of Wilmette, while adhering to the basic concept of bringing the e-commerce giant’s merchandising depth and breadth to physical retail.

In doing so, the company aims to re-create the positive impact of the Illinois store, bolstering its business in each geographic area—a result CEO Niraj Shah has described as a “halo effect.”

“We’ve been very encouraged by the store,” Liza Lefkowski, Wayfair’s vice president of curation, brands and stores, tells Business of Home. She says the Wilmette location continues to “represent the brand’s selection and range to customers.”

More important has been its effect on business. “We’re seeing online revenues in the area around the store up 15 percent relative to similar geographic areas,” says Lefkowski. “People want to go into the store and see [product] in person” before placing an order online.

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Interestingly, the company has found that most of the store’s visitors are new to the brand. “And we are pulling from a pretty large geographic area—from a 100-mile radius,” adds Lefkowski.

As the Wilmette store moves into its second year, she says Wayfair has made some changes to its merchandising mix to reflect the way consumers have been shopping there. “People were coming in wanting to take home their purchases that day for instant gratification,” she explains—something the store wasn’t necessarily set up to accommodate at first. That has meant moving more inventory onto the selling floor as opposed to the back room, where an employee had to retrieve it. It also means that the front of the store is now being merchandised more seasonally so shoppers see fresh goods that reflect the time of the year right as they enter. The store is now getting ready to display its back-to-school assortment.

Furniture continues to be broadly merchandised by design style, with a mix of vignettes and goods shown by classification. Wayfair’s specialty brands—Joss & Main, AllModern and Birch Lane—are on the floor, though its upscale nameplate Perigold is not in the mix. In the kitchen and bath area, meanwhile, Wayfair is finding more project-based sales than originally anticipated, as the extensive offerings have raised awareness of the category with shoppers who might not have realized how much the retailer played in this space.

All of these findings will be reflected in the next two stores. The Atlanta outpost, opening in a former Walmart location next spring, will be a similar size to the Wilmette one but on one floor as opposed to two, providing more usable selling space. And there will be an effort to incorporate more products that “feel local to Atlanta,” says Lefkowski.

At 114,000 square feet, the Yonkers store will be smaller than its two predecessors and spread across two floors. It will be situated in an outdoor center where an Apple Store and Sephora are among the other tenants. Lefkowski says that even with the smaller footprint, the location will still carry the full range of Wayfair categories across 19 departments, just like the other two stores. No doubt by then there will be additional modifications to the model as the company discovers more about customer preferences in Wayfair stores.

And what about more stores beyond these three? Lefkowski, echoing Shah’s statements to analysts, declined to provide specifics other than to say there will be additional locations—where and when still to be announced. In the meantime, Wayfair is on its way to a model that will more fully balance e-commerce with physical retail. It’s taken a while to get that process started, but now it appears to be well on its way.

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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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