Dive Brief:
- Online home design brand Ernesta opened its first brick-and-mortar showroom in Manhattan’s Upper East Side to complement its online offerings.
- The 800-square-foot store features a hands-on environment for customers and designers to browse Ernesta’s vast rug collection, according to a company press release.
- The store allows for one-on-one assistance and a private lounge for professionals to review samples with clients.
Dive Insight:
Ernesta is the latest DTC brand to adopt a hybrid distribution model to scale its business and grow and retain customers in the nearly $18 billion domestic rug and carpet market.
Ernesta up to now has been a purely online retailer. The opening of the showroom at 1052 Lexington Avenue marks an evolution for the brand’s customer experience.
“Our New York City showroom will be a destination for the local design community to connect with like-minded design enthusiasts, seek design support and browse the Ernesta rug catalog in person," John Foley, CEO of Ernesta, said in a statement. “We're excited to bring this experience to our consumer and trade partners and to help them make all of their design projects successful and beautiful.”
The new showroom offers an experience that helps consumers and designers better understand the products prior to purchase.
Ernesta was the brainchild of Peloton co-founders Foley, Hisao Kushi and Yony Feng, who announced in late 2022 that they had raised $25 million in a Series A funding round for their new startup. Five other former Peloton executives joined them in the new venture, taking on various marketing and operational roles.
Following the company's invite-only alpha launch, Ernesta in the spring of 2023 released a beta e-commerce program in which customers would be selected from a waitlist to make a purchase. In September that year, the company announced its designer quality rugs were available for purchase on its website.
With this week’s store launch, Ernesta follows the trend of online retailers morphing into a hybrid model that relies on both online and brick-and-mortar stores to sell products.
A study by GlobalData released last December said the era of selling exclusively online has leveled off in the U.S., and that DTC brands were embracing a flexible, hybrid distribution model to capture and keep customers in a post-pandemic world.
