How to Sell Home Design Online

The buzz at last week’s Salone del Mobile in Milan was a testament to the increasing cultural relevance of interior design. Brands from Saint Laurent to The Row staged activations alongside stalwarts of the category like Cassina and Flos.

“There were queues everywhere,” said Isabelle Dubern-Mallevays, co-founder of luxury homeware site Invisible Collection. Dubern-Mallevays estimated that around one third of Salone attendees were private clients, a significantly larger chunk than in previous years, showing the category’s growing mainstream appeal.

Though not as physically apparent as endless queues around the city during Salone, the online design buzz is evolving, too. Amid a wider luxury downturn, the category has shrunk slightly: Bain & Company estimated the global market for high-end design at €51 billion ($57.5 billion) in 2024, down 1 to 3 percent from 2023 due to pressures including geopolitical conflict, a luxury slowdown and a cooling real estate market.

So why are luxury fashion e-tailers like Mytheresa and Moda Operandi, and dedicated design e-tailers like Invisible Collection and Tom Chapman’s Abask, still bullish on the category?

Homeware Bound

Luxury design was one of Covid-19’s lucky winners: Stuck inside our own four walls, the home reasserted its role in expressing who we are. “Social media played a huge role,” said Mytheresa’s chief buying officer Tiffany Hsu. “People began posting from home and integrating lifestyle objects into their personal style.”

Fashion influencers like Julie Sergent Ferreri feature interiors heavily on their Instagram feed. Ferreri’s bio reads “I’m a stay-at-home girl,” in contrast to previous generations of aspirational content dominated by tropical vacations.

This cultural shift hasn’t gone unnoticed. Luxury e-tailers like Mytheresa have made serious investments in design, building out its homeware vertical called “Life.”

“Fifteen years ago, people said no one would ever buy expensive fashion online. Now, we’re seeing a similar shift in interiors,” said Richard Johnson, Mytheresa’s chief commercial officer. For Mytheresa, the category builds upon a simple hypothesis: “If they care so deeply about their wardrobe, of course they’ll care just as much about how they live,” said Hsu.

During sluggish luxury times, design can offer a cushion for fashion-focussed e-tailers. “We saw the home category have a larger increase in sales compared to other categories in 2024, and that trend continues into 2025,” said Moda Operandi.

E-tailers also face diminishing competition from brick-and-mortar chains. Conran Shop shuttered its Marylebone and Paris flagships over the past two years, while Habitat shut its stores in France, Spain, Morocco, Switzerland and the UK.

Differentiated Strategies

Fashion e-tailers with homeware sections mostly focus on smaller decorative items that can be displayed on a table. Design-focussed e-tailers need to sell the table itself.

Invisible Collection, founded in 2016, taps that market by focussing on custom, collectible pieces. The site caters to the 1 percent, and cultivates close ties with the designers and architects who steer major home purchases for them. The retailer boasts an average basket of €13,000 and 90 percent repeat customers, it said.

Matchesfashion co-founder Tom Chapman also saw opportunity in this evolving space, launching design platform Abask in 2022 alongside former Matchesfashion VP Nicolas Pickaerts. In 2024, Abask tripled revenue and expects to double it again in 2025. “There’s a real shift in what people value,” said Pickaerts. “Customers are moving away from trends and toward design objects that feel permanent — future heirlooms.”

Design inventory is expensive, but holds onto its value longer and helps power a higher share of big-ticket sales. “Home design is less seasonal, more emotional and tends to carry higher order values than fashion,” said Pickaerts. There’s also no sizing, fewer returns and slower cycles of novelty and mark-down.

Fashion e-tailers like Mytheresa and Moda Operandi also sell furniture like chairs or lamps, but still skew towards smaller pieces of décor that can be easily stored and shipped. The average item price at Mytheresa Life is €500, though prices go up to $6,155 for a Venini vase, for instance. “We’d like to go into furniture eventually,” said Hsu. Mytheresa, known for its rigorous curation in the womenswear space, is marrying the site’s fashion strengths with homeware by launching design capsule collections with brands like Missoni and Dolce & Gabbana. “We want to be a one-stop shop for luxury — that’s why curation for all our categories is key.”

“The point of Life is to deepen our relationship with existing customers,” said Hsu. 60 percent of Life’s sales come from Mytheresa’s top-tier clients — the 4 percent of customers who generate around 40 percent of its total revenue. “We saw rapid growth from the outset,” added Johnson. “We didn’t have to build a new customer base, since the audience was already there.”

No Stock, No Problem

One of the biggest hurdles in growing a design business is finding the space to store items — the larger, the more costly. The same applies when it comes to shipping. Some e-tailers have found ways to circumvent that issue by focussing on e-concession models — like peer-to-peer platforms 1stdibs or Pamono.

Invisible Collection focusses on made-to-order items, holding no stock of its own. “Everything is custom-made on demand,” said Dubern-Mallevays. “Our return rate is near zero, but on the rare occasion a customer changes their mind, we put the item in one of our galleries.”

Savvy inventory practices, reliable shipping and “white-glove service” go a long way — especially in times of political uncertainty. The latest tariff rollercoaster affected the industry hugely, though for seasoned players, it is nothing new.

“We’ve been through four major crises in ten years — Brexit, global shipping delays with boats stuck at sea, the war in the Ukraine and now US tariffs,” Dubern-Mallevays said. “We prepared for all of them.” 60 percent of Invisible Collection’s sales come from the US, so the company opened a local stateside entity. “We were ready, and then they disappeared overnight [as Trump paused tariff plans]!” said Dubern-Mallevays.

The lingering threat of tariffs remains a major concern for the global design sector, for whom wealthy Americans’ homes have long been the target market.

To buffer American uncertainty, companies are looking East. “Chinese clients are bored with mass-market production — they’re drawn to craftsmanship and the French aesthetic,” Dubern-Mallevays says.

Invisible Collection also plans to open a gallery in Mumbai by year’s end.

As interest in the category widens, even in a shaky world, economy, design and homeware players are betting they can find new horizons for growth.