Dive Brief:

• UPDATE: Online furniture and home goods retailer Hem, a brainchild of Fab.com founder Jason Goldberg, was sold to Swiss furniture company Vitra for an udisclosed amount, reports dezeen. TechCrunch initially reported that Hem was to be sold to Vitra for $20 million.

• If TechCrunch's report is accurate, that figure is a significant drop from the $300 million in investments (much of it from Fab) and the $1 billion valuation that Hem/Fab once garnered.

• The sale could enable Hem to achieve its ambitions by improving its opportunities to scale.

Dive Insight:

Furniture and mattresses are emerging as a surprising area for e-commerce, considering their bulk and the desire of many shoppers to try things out in person.

Goldberg in some ways may have been ahead of his time. As millennials have grown up, moved out, and have money to spend, they are among the kinds of shoppers most likely to be willing to buy furniture online.

More than one third of consumers surveyed by consultancy Kurt Salmon last fall said they would shop for furniture online over the next few years, while just a quarter said so in 2008. Shoppers who do buy furniture online spent over $500 on their last such online purchase, and nearly half of made a purchase more than once within the last year, the study found.

“The furniture industry, however, has yet to dive full force into the online space, likely due to the fact that buying furniture has largely been perceived as dependent on the visual and tactile in-store experience,” according to the report. “But shifting consumer behavior means that furniture retailers must capitalize on the growing e-commerce market to drive sales among the increasing number of tech-savvy Millennials to remain competitive.”

It’s possible that Goldberg made his move just ahead of the wave, missing the potential of that the millennial shopper provides. But the problem could also be Hem’s ability to scale, considering that big-box retailers so far have been the most successful sellers of furniture online, above all, Amazon. And Goldberg acknowledged that challenge last year, TechCrunch notes:

“E-commerce is very much a scale business, where the winner takes all,” Goldberg told TechCrunch in 2014. “It’s not that hard to build a $100 million revenue e-commerce business, but how do you scale after initial customer enthusiasm to consistently shipping fast, holding inventory, and so on. When you have scale it is much easier.”