Dropshipping Home Decor With The Best Vendors and Brands

Summary

The dropshipping market continues to grow, with expectations to achieve a CAGR of 32% from 2021 to 2026. As the market expands, the furniture and home decor dropshipping segment is expected to grow as well, as consumers spend more on luxury home decor, furniture, and appliance products.

Retailers can take advantage of this growth by implementing dropshipping strategies into their retail model. In doing so, retailers can reduce or fully eliminate the need — and cost — of maintaining inventory and handling fulfillment by shifting those responsibilities to home decor dropshipping-enabled vendors.

But adopting a dropshipping model doesn’t guarantee overnight success. To effectively dropship home decor, retailers must take care to identify, vet, and develop relationships with dropshipping vendors and brands that fit into the retailer’s — and its customers’ — expectations and needs.

How Retailers Excel Using Home Decor Dropshipping

Home decor retailers may take one of three retail approaches to fulfill e-commerce orders. With the traditional model, retailers must hold and maintain inventory and fulfill customer orders directly. With a mix of the traditional retail model and dropshipping, retailers hold some inventory and supplement their product assortment via partnerships with home decor dropshipping vendors. A pure dropshipping approach relies entirely on dropshipping vendors to hold inventory and fulfill orders, freeing retailers from holding any inventory.

Retailers can take one of three approaches when considering how to dropship home decor:

Each of these methods can be viable for your brand — what matters most is how they’re implemented into your retail strategy.

Let’s start by looking at Wayfair, a home goods retailer that accounts for 1.3% of all online sales in the U.S. Wayfair pulled in more than $8.8 billion in sales in 2020, surpassed only by Amazon, Home Depot, and Walmart.

The kicker? Wayfair dropships 95% of the products it sells. This creates an “endless aisle” in which Wayfair offers a wide array of products without holding much inventory or directly focusing on fulfillment.

Contrast this approach to a home decor retailer like Joybird, which was acquired by La-Z-Boy in 2018 after reporting annual revenue of $55 million. Joybird began by designing, manufacturing, and distributing its own products. Then, in an effort to offer complementary products to its own branded furniture, Joybird incorporated home decor dropshipping to sell products such as rugs, lighting, and pillows.

This made it possible for customers to complete the look of any given room in one order from a single retailer without requiring Joybird to acquire, hold, and ship additional inventory. The strategy worked well for Joybird, as evidenced by its record sales of $40 million in Q2 FY2022.

Tips to Successfully Dropship Home Decor

Successful home decor dropshipping requires retailers to find, connect, and nurture relationships with dropship-capable vendors that are a good fit for the brand’s values and approach. Because so much responsibility shifts out of your hands and into that of your partners, it’s important to work with vendors that meet your standards, both in terms of product and fulfillment quality.

Determine your home decor dropshipping model

Unlike the traditional retail model, dropshipping necessitates a move away from maintaining inventory and fulfilling orders yourself. But what home decor dropshipping model works best for your brand?

Compare your current and preferred retail model with that of established retailers. If you’re currently offering branded products that are unique to your business and meeting or exceeding sales goals, it may make sense to supplement your product assortment with dropshipping.

In contrast, if your brand is new or there’s little attachment to your current product assortment, it may make sense to go all-in with dropshipping. With this approach, most of your products are sourced from and fulfilled by your dropshipping vendors.

Attend trade shows

Many home decor dropshipping suppliers can be found at trade shows throughout the country. Attending these shows and visiting vendor showrooms lets you evaluate available merchandise, giving you the opportunity to consider if and how a vendor’s products fit into your desired product assortment.

However, because some vendors are only in attendance at certain shows, it’s important to attend as many trade shows as possible. Doing so increases the likelihood of finding vendors with limited attendance at trade shows.

Vet home decor dropshipping vendors in person

Since vendors are responsible for holding inventory and fulfilling your customers’ orders, it’s important to find vendors you can trust to honor their contracts and deliver quality products in a timely fashion.

In 2021, a significant percentage of houseware purchases led to returns. Properly vetting your vendors helps you potentially avoid selling low-quality products that could lead to returns. During vetting, you can also evaluate the responsiveness of their sales reps.

Develop relationships with vendors

Once you’ve vetted and begun working with a vendor, focus on developing and nurturing a relationship to remove the barriers to collaboration.

Building a strong relationship with your vendors helps ensure all parties are strategically aligned, trusting of one another, and able to share information and ideas back and forth. This collaboration allows you and your vendors to share research and develop, introduce, and market new or custom products together.

Partner with dropshipping marketplaces and sourcing agents

Dropshipping marketplaces may run standalone or seamlessly integrated into your existing retail e-commerce platform. This allows you to expose your customers to a wide product assortment fulfilled by various dropshipping vendors.

Using these platforms may also facilitate how you find vendors and source products, helping you identify, vet, and onboard new products and partners quickly.