The Chinese Furniture Market

The Chinese furniture market is no longer a growth story you can describe with one number. It is a big, mature, oversupplied market that changed direction after the property crisis. Demand did not disappear. It moved: from furnishing empty new apartments to replacing what people already own. If you sell furniture and you are still reading market reports written before 2022, you are pricing and planning against a market that no longer exists.

I am Olivier Verot, founder of Gentlemen Marketing Agency. I have lived in Shanghai since 2012 and my team has worked with European and American furniture, kitchen and home brands entering China, from solid wood dining ranges to contract projects for hotel groups. This article covers the market data. If you want the brand-building playbook instead, read our companion piece on how to market a furniture brand in China.

The market in numbers, and why the old “$35 billion” figure misleads

This article used to open with a headline of 35 billion dollars and 16% growth. Both numbers are dead, and the way they were built was never clear. Different sources count different things, and that is the first trap for a foreign brand doing market sizing.

Here is what the official Chinese sources actually measured in 2025.

Read the table again, because the two lines that matter contradict each other. Factory revenue fell 10.7%, but furniture retail sales rose 14.6%, which is almost 11 points faster than total retail in China. Full numbers are in the CNFA 2025 industry briefing.

The gap has three causes. Exports fell, and Chinese factories export far more than they sell at home, so the manufacturing line carries the trade shock. Factory-gate prices dropped, because there is too much capacity chasing fewer orders. And the government trade-in subsidy pushed consumers to buy replacement furniture in stores, which lifts retail without lifting factory revenue. So the correct answer to “is the Chinese furniture market growing?” is: the selling side is, the making side is not.

Property is the demand engine, and the engine changed gear

Furniture in China has always been a follow-on purchase to a home handover. That link is the whole story of the last four years. In 2025 the country sold 881 million square metres of new-build property, down 8.7% year on year, with residential down 9.2%, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Sales value came in at 8.39 trillion RMB. Developer defaults, delayed handovers and buyer caution all fed into it.

The second-hand market picked up the slack. In the 30 cities tracked by China Index Academy, existing homes reached roughly 65% of residential transactions in 2025, up about four points on 2024, and in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chengdu and Hangzhou the share of second-hand deals passed 60%. A second-hand flat comes with old kitchens, tired floors and someone else’s sofa. It generates a renovation order, not a full furnishing order.

That is the pivot foreign brands keep missing. A new-build handover generates a bulk order of everything at once, usually at the cheapest acceptable price, often through the developer. A renovation generates a smaller number of higher-value, more considered purchases: one sofa, one dining table, one bed. Fewer items, more brand sensitivity, more research before the buy. For a European brand with a real product and a real price, that trade is favourable.

Urbanisation still adds buyers, just slowly. China ended 2025 at 67.89% urban, up 0.89 points, which is around 10 million new urban residents in one year. That is real demand, but it is nowhere near the flow the industry planned capacity for.

Two markets under one label: residential and contract

The market offers a wide, fragmented choice of products, and it splits cleanly into two.

• Residential furniture (B2C). Beds, sofas, wardrobes, dining tables, chairs, TV units. This is the segment that follows home handovers and renovations, and it is where brand and design matter most.
• Non-residential, or contract furniture (B2B). Offices, hotels, hospitals, restaurants, shopping malls, schools and public buildings. Volume business, tender-driven, long payment terms, and far less visible from the outside.

Inside the residential half, one Chinese category has no real western equivalent and it is the biggest one: 全屋定制, full-home custom furniture. Chinese apartments are small and irregular, so built-in wardrobes, custom cabinetry and fitted kitchens are ordered by the square metre from brands like Oppein, Suofeiya and Zhibang. This is a market of its own worth over a trillion RMB by industry estimates, and it is almost entirely closed to imported brands because it is a measure-and-install service, not a product. Understand it anyway, because it eats a large share of the renovation budget before your sofa is even considered.

Imported furniture is a narrow slice, and it is mostly Italian

Every foreign brand overestimates the size of the imported segment. China imported 11.2 billion RMB of furniture, mattresses and related goods in 2025, down 2.7%. That is roughly 1.5 billion USD for the whole country. Italy alone accounted for 2.89 billion RMB and Germany for 1.16 billion RMB, per Furniture Today China’s 2025 trade data.

Two conclusions follow. First, if your business case assumes a large addressable import market, rebuild it. The imported segment is small, premium and concentrated at the top. Second, Italy owns the reference position in Chinese consumers’ minds for high-end furniture, the way France owns cosmetics. If you are Dutch, Danish, Belgian or American, you are not fighting Italy on prestige. You compete on a specific promise: solid wood construction, ergonomics, scale that fits a 90 square metre flat, or a design signature the Italian houses do not have.

Exports tell the other half of the trade story. China exported 67.8 billion USD of furniture in 2025, down 5.9%, with the US share falling to about 22.8% after a 16.4% drop. Chinese factories are losing American orders and looking for domestic and European buyers. Practical consequence: your Chinese competitors on the shop floor got hungrier and cheaper in 2025, and some of them are the same factories that once made products for western brands.

Who actually owns the floor: domestic players

Chinese furniture brands are no longer the low-end option. Man Wah, which sells under the CHEERS brand, dominates the motion sofa segment. Kuka Home and Oppein run national retail networks in the hundreds of stores. De Rucci built a mattress brand on European design cues and heavy advertising. These companies have showroom footprints, after-sales teams and financing that no imported brand can match in the first three years.

They also compress your price ladder. A Chinese premium sofa can cost 15,000 to 30,000 RMB with local delivery, local warranty and next-week availability. An imported equivalent lands at 40,000 to 80,000 RMB with a 10 to 14 week wait. That gap has to be justified by something the buyer can see and touch. It usually is not justified by the word “imported” alone, and the Chinese consumer learned that lesson the hard way, as the Da Vinci case below shows.

Smart furniture and the electric sofa

The clearest growth pocket in the category is powered and connected furniture. Motion sofas, the ones with electric recliners, USB charging and adjustable headrests, had a penetration rate of only about 9.7% in China in 2023 against 49.5% in the United States. Adjustable bed bases follow the same curve. That gap is the strongest structural growth argument in Chinese furniture right now, and both Chinese and foreign brands know it.

The wider smart home category pulls in the same direction. IDC put China’s 2025 smart home device shipments at around 279 million units, up 4.6%, supported by the state trade-in subsidies. Chinese buyers now expect a sofa, a bed or a wardrobe to connect to something, whether that is a lighting scene, a voice assistant or a phone app. We cover the adjacent category in our analysis of China’s smart appliances market.

For a foreign brand, this is a product decision before it is a marketing decision. If your range has no powered option and no local voice assistant integration, you are selling into the slower half of the market. If your factory can build a motion version and certify it for China, you have an argument that Chinese buyers already understand.

What Chinese buyers want, and how they decide

Chinese consumers treat the home as an extension of the self, in the same way clothing is. Appearance matters, guests matter, and the living room is the room that gets shown. Brand loyalty has strengthened over the last decade, and the aspiration to a better quality of life pushes buyers toward names they recognise. At the same time, the search for a good quality-to-price ratio is the defining behaviour of this market. Both things are true at once, and brands that only play one of them lose.

The research phase is long and it happens online. Chinese buyers compare, screenshot, ask friends, read reviews and only then walk into a store. Furniture is the opposite of an impulse category: the decision cycle for a sofa runs two to six months, and it starts in the middle of a renovation project rather than at a product page.

Three demand trends are worth planning around:

• Children’s and teenager furniture. Birth rates are low, but spend per child is high. Parents with more income than the previous generation buy ergonomic desks, adjustable chairs and certified low-emission materials for a child’s room.
• Soft decoration. Curtains, lighting, rugs, frames, ornaments and cushions. This is the fastest-refreshed part of the home and the entry point for many foreign brands. See our detail on the China home decor market.
• Low-emission and certified materials. Formaldehyde is a mainstream consumer concern in China, not a niche one. E0 and ENF board grades, and any European emission certificate, get quoted in product listings because buyers search for them.

Where furniture actually gets sold in 2026

Furniture malls remain the backbone of offline retail. Red Star Macalline and Easyhome run enormous multi-brand buildings where dozens of brands rent space, and they have been consolidating and closing weaker sites as traffic fell. Imported ranges sit in specialist stores or in the high-end sections of those malls. Chain retail and brand-owned showrooms take the rest.

Online commerce keeps taking share, and it is not only price-driven any more. Tmall, JD and Douyin all sell furniture, JD with the strongest logistics for bulky goods, Douyin with live-streamed showroom tours that work better for this category than anyone expected. The balance between online and offline matters more in furniture than in almost any other category: buyers research online and sit on the sofa offline.

The channel most foreign brands underuse is the interior designer. In Chinese renovations, the designer or the 整装 full-package renovation company writes the shopping list. If your brand is not in their catalogue, with a commission structure and a sample they can show, you are not in the conversation. This channel behaves like distribution, and it comes with the same partner-selection problems described in our piece on the real challenges of franchising in China.

Xiaohongshu is the reference library for Chinese renovations

Interior design magazines used to set the trends in this category. That job now belongs to Xiaohongshu. Around 140 million users browse home and furniture content on the platform every month, and home and renovation search volume grew roughly 30% year on year in the first half of 2025. Post-1990 users make up about 65% of that audience, which is exactly the renovation generation.

The mechanism matters more than the numbers. A Chinese buyer starting a renovation searches Xiaohongshu for their apartment type, “80 square metre two-bedroom, cream style”, and reads other people’s real budgets and mistakes. Furniture brands surface inside those posts, in room photos, with dimensions and prices in the comments. Purely commercial posts get ignored. Posts by real homeowners and small accounts, what China calls KOC content, get saved. Search visibility inside Xiaohongshu is the asset here, not follower count, and it works like SEO: keyword in the title, keyword in the first line, keyword in the image text. Our analysis of whether KOL marketing actually works in China covers how the KOC layer is priced.

Baidu still matters, but for a different job. It is where a Chinese distributor, hotel buyer or designer checks whether your company is real before replying to your email. Generative search does the same job now: buyers ask DeepSeek or Doubao “which imported solid wood dining table brands are available in Shanghai”, and those models answer from indexed Chinese-language content, Baidu Baike, Zhihu, Xiaohongshu posts and industry media. If your brand has no Chinese-language footprint, you are not in the answer, and there is no ad slot to buy your way in.

Cross-border e-commerce works, until the shipping weight kills it

Cross-border platforms let you sell directly to Chinese consumers without a local entity or an importer, and they remain the cheapest way to test demand. For furniture they have a hard limit: freight. Cross-border works for lighting, textiles, small decor and flat-packed items. It breaks on a 90 kilo dining table, where shipping and returns eat the margin. The realistic sequence is to test small SKUs, then move to bonded stock or a local importer, then open one physical showroom.

What worked for Ruud, a Dutch solid wood brand

Ruud runs a family-owned Dutch company making solid oak dining tables, sideboards and bed frames. He entered China in 2021 through a Shanghai importer with three showrooms. By early 2024 his importer’s sell-through had fallen 34% in two years. Handovers of new apartments in the importer’s cities had dried up, and the showrooms were sitting in furniture malls that had lost traffic.

What he tried first: a Tmall Global flagship store and Baidu SEM on his brand name. Both failed, for reasons that were predictable. Nobody in China searched his brand name, so the SEM budget bought a few hundred clicks a month from people who were already customers. And cross-border shipping on a 70 kilo oak table made the landed price absurd against a Chinese solid wood competitor with a warehouse in Foshan.

What worked was repositioning the product against the renovation market rather than the new-home market, and rebuilding the channel around who writes the shopping list. Three moves. He produced Xiaohongshu content shot in real Chinese apartments, with Chinese dimensions in centimetres and the price in RMB, because his tables were sized for Dutch dining rooms and Chinese buyers could not visualise them. He signed a designer programme with 60 interior designers and renovation companies in Shanghai and Hangzhou, with a sample kit and a fixed commission. And he took the contract channel seriously, targeting boutique hotels and co-working operators who buy 40 tables at once.

After 14 months: the designer channel produced 41% of orders, average order value went from 9,800 RMB to 21,000 RMB because designers specify full room sets rather than single pieces, and the Shanghai showroom went from walk-in traffic to roughly 60 booked appointments a month sourced from Xiaohongshu. Total volume grew about 55% over the period. Not a miracle, and it took a year before the first designer orders landed.

The B2B side, where the volume hides

Contract furniture is the part of the Chinese market that foreign brands ignore and Chinese factories fight over. Three buyer types matter.

• Hotels. Chinese hotel groups renovate on a five to seven year cycle, and the mid-to-upscale segment keeps opening. A single property refit is a several-million-RMB furniture order. The buying happens through design institutes and procurement agents, not through your website.
• Developers and property managers. Fully fitted apartments, 精装修, are now the norm in many cities, which means the developer selects the kitchen, the wardrobes and sometimes the furniture. Volume is down with the property market, but the survivors are premium projects that will pay for a recognised brand as a selling point.
• Offices and co-working. A separate business with its own dynamics, covered in our study of the office furniture market in China. The supplier base is fragmented, with the top five players holding under 10% of the market and most capacity sitting with regional manufacturers in Guangdong and Zhejiang.

Contract business has slower payment and thinner margins than retail, but it builds installed reference projects, and reference projects are what a Chinese buyer asks for first.

IKEA still explains this market better than any report

IKEA started selling in China in the late 1990s and had to solve every problem a foreign furniture brand still faces. Apartments and houses in China are smaller and demand practical solutions, so functionality mattered more than in Europe. Import duties pushed prices well above local entry-level brands, which flipped the brand’s positioning: a mass-market name in Europe, IKEA read as an aspirational middle-class purchase in China and had to target higher-income urban households instead of its usual core.

The fix was industrial, not promotional. IKEA built factories and a supply base in China, cut prices by more than half over time, and used its own site, WeChat and Weibo to reach urban young buyers. The lesson holds in 2026: in furniture, your China strategy is a cost and logistics strategy first, and a communication strategy second. Belgian brand Ethnicraft made the smaller version of the same bet in Shanghai, investing in online presence to drive traffic into physical stores, and it works because Chinese buyers still need to sit on the thing.

Reputation decides the sale in this category

High-end furniture buyers in China are suspicious, and they have reason to be. The Da Vinci case is still the reference point, quoted whenever someone questions an imported label.

There was a scandal involving Da Vinci Furniture, a retailer of high-fashion furniture brands including Versace Home, Fendi Casa, Kenzo Maison and Cerruti, with mega-stores in Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia, Hong Kong and China. A CCTV news report investigated quality problems with the company’s expensive products, and the Shanghai Entry-Exit Inspection and Quarantine Bureau announced that the company’s “made in Italy” products were actually made in China, shipped to China’s border, and then suddenly became “imported” the next day. Notable in the CCTV report, a twin bed branded “Cappeletti” was reported to be manufactured by the Dongguan Changfeng Furniture Company, where it sold for about 30,000 RMB, yet was priced ten times higher at 300,000 RMB by Da Vinci because it was “imported”.

Da Vinci went on to lose its first lawsuit over deceiving a customer, as reported by the South China Morning Post. The consequence for you is concrete: publish your country of manufacture, your certifications and your factory location in Chinese, on your own Chinese pages and in your product listings. Do not let a competitor or a forum thread be the first place a buyer finds that information. The same discipline applies to any premium positioning, as we explain in our guide on launching a designer brand in China.

FAQ

Is the Chinese furniture market still worth entering in 2026?

Yes, but not on the old assumptions. Volume growth from new housing is gone: new-build sales fell 8.7% in 2025 and will not return to the 2020 peak. What replaced it is a replacement and renovation market where buyers spend more per item and care more about brand and material. That suits a European or American brand with a genuine product far better than the old bulk-furnishing market did. It does not suit a brand whose only argument is that it is foreign.

How big is the imported furniture segment really?

Small. China imported 11.2 billion RMB of furniture and related goods in 2025, around 1.5 billion USD, down 2.7%. Italy takes the largest share at 2.89 billion RMB, Germany second at 1.16 billion RMB. Any business plan assuming a multi-billion-dollar addressable import market is wrong. The realistic target for a mid-sized foreign brand is a single-city or two-city presence with a designer and contract channel, not national coverage.

Should I sell through cross-border e-commerce or set up locally?

It depends on shipping weight. Cross-border works for lighting, textiles, small decor and flat-pack items, where freight is a small share of the price. It fails for large case goods and upholstery, where a 70 to 90 kilo item makes the landed price uncompetitive and delivery takes weeks. Most furniture brands test cross-border on small SKUs, then move to bonded stock or a local importer for the heavy ranges, then open one physical showroom.

Which channel brings the first real orders?

For imported furniture, usually the interior designer and renovation-company channel, followed by contract projects. Chinese consumers rarely buy a 40,000 RMB sofa from a brand they discovered yesterday. Designers already have the client’s budget and floor plan, and they specify complete rooms. Build a designer programme with samples and a clear commission before you spend on advertising, and use Xiaohongshu to make sure the brand looks real when the client checks it.

About Gentlemen Marketing Agency

We are a China-based marketing agency and we have run market entry for furniture, kitchen and home brands since 2012, from Shanghai.

For this category we work on three things: Xiaohongshu and Douyin visibility that reaches renovating homeowners, a Chinese-language presence that survives a distributor’s due diligence check on Baidu and on AI assistants, and the designer and contract channels that produce the large orders.

If you want a candid read on whether your range fits the Chinese renovation market, get in touch with our consultants. First conversation, no fee.