Stig runs a family furniture company in Iceland. Solid oak, wool upholstery, the kind of pieces a Nordic buyer keeps for twenty years. He opened a Tmall flagship store in 2023 because a consultant told him China was the biggest furniture market on earth. Eleven months later he had spent about 1.4 million RMB on platform advertising and shipped 38 orders. Average basket of 9,800 RMB. He called us in Shanghai with a simple question: is the market wrong, or am I?
Written by Olivier Verot, founder of GMA. I have been based in Shanghai since 2012 and my team has worked with European and Nordic furniture and home brands on Xiaohongshu content, showroom traffic and B2B contracts with Chinese developers and hotel groups. LinkedIn.
He was not wrong about the size. He was wrong about the buying cycle. Furniture is not a product you sell with a coupon and a livestream. It is a long-cycle purchase, tied to housing, and Chinese housing has been in trouble since the developer crisis. Any article about marketing furniture in China that skips that part is lying to you.
Start with the housing numbers, because everything else follows from them
In 2025, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, floor space of completed buildings in China fell 18.1% year on year, and residential completions fell 20.2%. New housing starts dropped 20.4%. Sales of newly built commercial housing fell 8.7% by floor area.
Fewer new apartments delivered means fewer empty flats that need to be filled from scratch. That is the demand that used to carry the whole category. A family took the keys to a bare shell unit, and within six months bought a sofa, a bed, a dining set, a wardrobe. One handover, one big basket.
Now look at the other side. Furniture retail sales at above-designated-size retailers reached 209.19 billion RMB in 2025, up 14.6% year on year, per the China National Furniture Association. Growth of 2.8% in 2023 and 3.6% in 2024, then 14.6%. Meanwhile domestic furniture output fell 4.0% and exports dropped 5.9% to 67.81 billion USD.
Read those two sets together. Retail is up while construction is down and production is down. The gap is the trade-in subsidy programme, which pushed a lot of households to replace an old sofa or bed earlier than they otherwise would. Subsidy-driven demand is real demand, but it is pulled forward. Plan on it fading, not repeating.
The category shifted from equipping to replacing
Renovation of existing homes now dominates. Industry estimates put old-home renovation at roughly 45% of the home decoration market in 2018 and around 63 to 65% by 2024. In first-tier and new first-tier cities, most renovation demand comes from second-hand apartments, not new deliveries. Second-hand transactions passed half of all residential deals in the biggest cities.
This changes the shape of your order. A replacement buyer does not buy eleven pieces. She buys the sofa, or the bed, or the dining table, one item, into a room that already has a style. She measures twice. She reads for weeks. She compares to what she already owns and asks whether the upgrade is worth 12,000 RMB.
So the consumer is more careful, buys less often, and buys better when she does. Fewer transactions, higher scrutiny per transaction, longer consideration window. Everything below is built around that.
Who actually buys, and what they buy
The old segmentation still holds up, so I am keeping it. Mainland furniture consumers split into three broad groups.
Wealthy buyers
They favour expensive Western pieces, classical Chinese style, or avant-garde design. Price is a signal, not an obstacle. This group is where imported brands get their margin, and it is the group least affected by the property slowdown, because they are usually buying a second or third home.
Brand-conscious buyers
They want furniture that reflects their personality. Aesthetics, cultural references, origin of the wood, name of the designer. This is the group Xiaohongshu was built for, and the one that will screenshot your piece and ask a decorating group whether it is worth the money.
Salaried buyers
The majority. They shop around for the best price and value comfort above everything. In 2026 this group has become noticeably slower to commit. If your entry price sits above 8,000 RMB per piece, do not build your plan on them.
Then there are the use cases, which matter because they run on completely different sales cycles: home furniture including cabinets and kitchen appliances, children’s furniture where parents pay for safety certification and development-appropriate design, outdoor furniture that has to survive a Chongqing summer and a Harbin winter, hotel and guesthouse furniture, office furniture, and public institution furniture where durability beats design every time.
The four channels that actually move furniture in 2026
1. Xiaohongshu, because that is where the room gets imagined
Home and interiors, 家居, has become one of the biggest content categories on Xiaohongshu. The platform’s own home industry reports show search volume in the home renovation category up around 30% year on year in the first half of 2025, and the audience skews toward users aged 23 to 30 in first-tier and new first-tier cities. A July 2025 industry report flagged mid-tier consumers as the dominant buying group.
The mechanism matters more than the platform name. A Chinese buyer renovating an 89 square metre apartment does not search for your brand. She searches for her apartment: “89平 小户型 客厅”, her floor plan, her building type. She collects a hundred saved posts over two months. Your job is to be inside those saved posts, in a real room, at a real scale, with the price visible.
That means content built around Chinese apartment dimensions, not your Reykjavik or Milan catalogue shots. A three-seat sofa photographed in a 200 square metre showroom tells a Shanghai buyer nothing. The same sofa in a 32 square metre living room, with the measurement overlaid, gets saved.
2. A physical showroom, because nobody buys a sofa they have not sat on
This is the part foreign brands resist because of the cost, and it is the part that decides the whole thing. Furniture is a touch purchase. Fabric hand-feel, seat depth, whether the wood grain looks like the photo. Chinese buyers will research online for two months then insist on sitting in it before transferring 20,000 RMB.
You do not need a flagship on Huaihai Road. A shared space with a lighting brand or a rug brand works. A corner inside a design-focused retailer works. What matters is having an address you can send a Xiaohongshu lead to, and staff who can close in person. Online for discovery, offline for conversion, and one WeChat account joining the two.
3. Interior designers, because they write the shopping list
In a renovation-led market, the person choosing your sofa is often not the person paying for it. The interior design studios handling mid and high-end apartment renovations hand clients a specification list. Get on that list and you get repeat volume without repeat marketing spend.
The way in is unglamorous. Trade pricing, a Chinese-language spec sheet with real dimensions and material certificates, sample fabrics couriered within 48 hours, and a named contact who answers on WeChat. Design studios drop brands that take four days to confirm a lead time. Also worth noting: design and furniture magazines, and their WeChat accounts, still carry weight with this audience and cost far less than a celebrity endorsement.
4. B2B, which is usually where the real volume sits
Selling 40 units to one boutique hotel group beats selling 40 units to 40 households, and the sales cost is a fraction. High-end residential developers still furnish show units and, in some projects, deliver furnished apartments. Hospitality keeps buying through the property downturn because hotels refurbish on a fixed cycle regardless of new construction.
Developer projects come with hard terms: payment schedules stretched over a year, penalty clauses, and after the developer crisis, real counterparty risk. Check who you are signing with. Hotel groups are the safer starting point for a foreign brand with no local balance sheet.
Logistics and after-sales decide whether you survive
This is what kills imported furniture brands in China, and almost nobody writes about it. A Chinese buyer is used to receiving a phone in 24 hours. Telling her the sofa arrives in nine weeks from Europe is not a delivery estimate, it is a cancellation.
Three things to fix before you spend a yuan on advertising:
- Hold stock in China. A bonded warehouse in Ningbo, Shanghai or Guangzhou on your best-selling three or four SKUs turns nine weeks into ten to fifteen days.
- Solve the last mile. Furniture delivery means two people carrying a wardrobe up a walk-up building and assembling it. Contract a specialist installation network, do not hand it to a standard parcel carrier.
- Publish a repair policy in Chinese. Who fixes a scratched veneer in year three, and at what price. Foreign brands answer this badly and the answer ends up quoted in Xiaohongshu comments.
Add customer service that actually replies. AI-assisted first-line response on WeChat handles the repetitive questions, dimensions, materials, lead time, stock, and hands anything about a specific order to a human. On a purchase this size, a slow reply reads as an unreliable brand.
What we changed for Stig
Back to the Icelandic brand. Two problems, both structural.
First, Tmall advertising was buying clicks from people in a browsing mood, not a renovating mood. Furniture does not convert on impulse traffic. Second, lead times ran nine to eleven weeks from Reykjavik. Every serious enquiry died at that sentence.
We cut the Tmall ad budget by roughly 70% and moved it into three things. A Xiaohongshu account posting rooms shot in real Shanghai apartments, 60 to 110 square metres, with dimensions and prices on the image. A 120 square metre shared showroom in Shanghai, split with a Danish lighting brand, staffed by two people. And bonded warehouse stock in Ningbo on four SKUs, which brought delivery down to twelve days.
Then we seeded interior designers. Fourteen studios received samples, trade pricing and a Chinese spec sheet. Six of them specified Stig’s pieces within a year.
Fourteen months in: about 6.2 million RMB in China revenue, against 1.9 million RMB in combined marketing and showroom cost. Around 41% of that revenue came from B2B, a Hangzhou boutique hotel group and the design studios. The showroom itself closed a majority of the direct consumer deals, but almost every buyer had first found the brand on Xiaohongshu. That is the whole point. The showroom converts, the content generates.
This is not a new discovery. Ethnicraft, the Belgian brand, made the same combination work years ago: build visibility on Chinese search, let customers browse and enquire online, then bring them to a showroom to actually decide. The channels have changed. The logic has not.
What to do Monday morning
Concrete, in order.
- Pick three or four SKUs, not your whole catalogue. Price them in RMB, delivered and installed, and check the number against what Chinese premium brands charge for the equivalent.
- Get a delivery quote for holding those SKUs in a Chinese bonded warehouse. If you cannot get under three weeks door to door, stop here and fix that first.
- Reshoot. Your existing photography is almost certainly in rooms too large for the Chinese market. Shoot in 60 to 110 square metre apartments with dimensions visible.
- Open the Xiaohongshu account and post three times a week for three months before you judge anything. This channel compounds slowly.
- Find a showroom partner rather than a lease. A complementary brand splitting the rent gets you an address in weeks instead of a year.
- Build a list of 15 interior design studios in one city. One city. Send samples, trade pricing and a Chinese spec sheet.
- Write your repair and warranty policy in Chinese before your first sale, not after your first complaint.
Notice that only one of those seven is advertising. In a long-cycle category, in a soft property market, the money goes into proof and availability. Ads amplify a working offer. They do not create one.
FAQ
Is the Chinese furniture market still worth entering with property in decline?
Yes, but for a different reason than five years ago. New construction is shrinking, with completions down 18.1% in 2025. The money moved to renovation of existing homes, which is now roughly two thirds of home decoration spending. That favours brands selling single high-quality pieces into rooms that already exist, and penalises brands whose plan was to fill empty new apartments cheaply. Check which of those you are before you commit budget.
Do I really need a showroom, or can I sell furniture online only in China?
Online-only works below roughly 3,000 RMB per piece. Above that, conversion collapses without somewhere to touch the product. Chinese buyers research online for weeks then want to sit on it. You do not need your own store: a shared space with a complementary brand, a corner in a design retailer, or a rotating pop-up all give you the address you need. Budget for staff who can close in person, not just a display.
How long before a furniture brand sees results in China?
Twelve to eighteen months for meaningful consumer revenue. The buying cycle itself runs six weeks to three months per customer, Xiaohongshu content takes about six months to build a searchable base, and interior design studios usually specify a brand only after seeing samples and a first successful project. B2B can move faster, four to six months for a hotel contract, which is why we often start there for brands that need early cash flow.
Working with us
GMA is a French and Chinese team in Shanghai. For furniture and home brands we handle Xiaohongshu and WeChat content built around Chinese apartment sizes, showroom traffic generation, and introductions to interior design studios and hospitality buyers. We work in the actual buying cycle of the category, which means we measure over quarters, not weeks.
If you want to know where your pieces sit against Chinese competitors on price and delivery, tell us what you sell and we will come back with an honest read. You can also start with our overviews of the Chinese furniture market and the home decor market in China.
