Andreas Hoerning
CEO
Westwing
Also available as audio
COVID-era home-spending booms mask structural fragility: once travel and dining resume, discretionary budgets shift away from furniture and home goods. Retailers must build for the post-surge contraction, not extrapolate from pandemic demand spikes.
Mix-and-match curation—pairing designer pieces with white-label basics—reflects how modern customers actually shop across price tiers. A one-stop destination model that accommodates this behavior across 22 countries outperforms rigid category or price-point segmentation.
AI-powered home visualization tools are moving from physical retail back into digital channels to solve a core discovery problem: helping customers articulate what they want before they buy. This bridges the gap between online convenience and in-store intuition.
Conversation 102
Precisely. So it was incredible. Offline was partially closed. Everyone was at home, exactly as you say. Plus, you didn't have discretionary spending on travels and on restaurants and so forth as much as beforehand. So you also had money to spend. So that was a boom. But after that, obviously comes the bus because people then had already spent a lot of money on their homes. And then everyone wanted to travel and go out to restaurants and see friends, et cetera. So that was actually a very tricky situation then for a lot of commerce, especially e-commerce and home and living more than others.
Andreas Hoarning, Inside Westwing’s Turnaround: The Decisions That Changed Everything at Westwing
Andreas Hoerning
OFFBounds Source · 102CEO · Westwing
