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I’ve never had a very keen sense of interior design. In all the spaces I’ve lived—and I mean all of them, from the start of my time as a sentient being—I’ve never really had an inclination to, you know, do anything with them: put stuff on the walls, get some furniture that made a statement, build toward comfort or style or something in between. Ambiance isn’t really my bag.
Don’t get me wrong: I like spending time in nice places, and have a true respect for well-appointed interiors. But it’s the respect of someone saying couldn’t be me, rather than the respect of someone who understands what’s going on when a space feels right.
So yes, I’m looking to get better at this stuff. Fortunately, there are many options for diving into home goods, but I need something truly basic—the real fundamentals.
Like, if one of the biggest and most powerful companies in the world got into this space, giving me a plethora of options right at my fingertips, that would be pretty ideal.
Oh, they did?
It ain’t just a river in Brazil, folks: it’s home goods, delivered directly to your home. Which creates an interesting sort of Theseus’ Ship paradox—is it still your home if you’re replacing everything in it?—but I’ll save that for another time.
You might not be surprised to know that Amazon Home has surged considerably over the past five years. Nor would it surprise you to learn that Amazon as a whole has continued to prosper. But it’s valuable to compare the momentum for both Amazon Home and Amazon (Whole), in order to see just how drastically the Home Goods division is winning hearts and minds across social media.
Here’s EMV for all of Amazon from 2018 to 2023:
Pretty sure this is the first of these graphs that I’ve done where the scale is in the billions. All told, Amazon has jumped from a measly, pathetic $1.3B EMV in 2018 (were they even trying?) to a mind-numbing $6.1B EMV in 2018. This equates to a five-year improvement of 369%.
Now let’s take a look at Amazon Home:
We’re back in the paltry millions here—basically what Jeff Bezos has misplaced in various old jackets—but all the same, Amazon Home has rocketed from $7.4M EMV in 2018 to $402.7M EMV in 2023. That’s a breezy five-year improvement of 5,334%.
You don’t need a graph to tell you that 5,334 is considerably larger than 369. By way of further comparison between Amazon as a whole and Amazon Home, we can look to another sub-brand, Amazon Fashion:
In yet another striking improvement, Amazon Fashion netted $65.5M EMV in 2018 and $821.8M EMV in 2023, making for a 1,155% five-year growth. Very impressive, and another feather in Amazon’s cap (which by this point is mostly feathers), but when it comes to an expanded social media footprint over the last five years, Amazon Home is still the reigning champ.
Why? Oh, let us count the ways…
Throughout these blog posts, I often talk about 2020, and the Pandemic at large, as an inflection point for brands and industries. I think that’s a fair framing of what was arguably, at least for many people reading this right now, the greatest period of upheaval and change in all of our lives. Whatever else might be true about that time, an event that led people to spend more time in their homes than ever before did have some positive ramifications for brands that help people make sure their homes look nice. Who knew?
And with many young professionals, including yours truly, primarily working from home, there are plenty of reasons for these trends to continue. While Amazon Home collected $402.7M EMV in 2023 as a whole, if we shift that 12-month timeframe to cover August 2023 to July 2024, Amazon Home pulled in $544.2M EMV—proof that the brand is only continuing to gain steam.
When you look at the home goods space as a whole, other key players are also seeing growth over the same five-year time period:
However, nobody is seeing growth—or a current EMV total—quite like Amazon Home. And beyond the obvious bump that the brand enjoys by being part of Amazon, there’s one other big reason, at least as I see it, why this is the case.
I’ve lost count of the times that I’ve identified TikTok as the key factor behind a brand’s growth, but given that this is a blog post for newsletter number 51, it’s probably somewhere around 51 times.
Well, whatever the number happens to be, it’s going to stay the same for another week, because Amazon Home’s success was all about Instagram. Let’s go to the numbers for August 2023 to July 2024, so that you can see for yourself:
Not only does Instagram account for 84% of Amazon Home’s total EMV, 78% of its impressions, and 81% of its engagements, but the brand’s improvements on the platform actually outpace its growth in these metrics at large. Conversely, it’s TikTok that’s bringing down Amazon Home’s averages. You know how rare it is for a brand that’s experiencing this level of growth to see a decline in TikTok engagement?
Very. It’s very rare. I don’t have numbers, but trust me on this: it’s, like, super rare.
We’ll get to exactly what this Instagram content looks like in a moment, but for now, I want to posit that one big reason why the platform is so important to Amazon Home is due to demographics. While many of the brands that have surged thanks to TikTok are focused on food and beverage, wellness, or skincare—hot topics amongst Gen Z consumers—home decor is a topic for a decidedly more millennial audience.
This is a great proof-point that for all of TikTok’s shine, Instagram is still a more than viable platform for finding new creators. You just have to be sure, as a brand, that the people you’re looking for are active there.
(You can also see, just from adding up these channel totals and comparing them to the brand’s totals, that YouTube was a pretty negligible factor for Amazon Home.)
Amazon Home’s most impactful content looks a lot like you would probably expect: immaculate interiors from creators who spend their lives perfecting the spaces they inhabit. Scrolling through these posts was both inspiring and disheartening, given the distance between my own living space and what these creators had put together. Yes, it gave me some ideas, but it also reminded me that there are levels to this, and I’m somewhere near the bottom.
One thing I noticed amid these immaculate interiors was the prevalence of Amazon Storefronts. Essentially a personalized page where someone’s followers can see all their recommendations (and purchase these recommendations more easily), Storefronts are just one of Amazon’s many influencer-specific initiatives.
They’re also quite possibly the most successful of these initiatives: from August 2023 to July 2024, posts mentioning a creator’s ‘Storefront’ inspired $118.6M EMV—22% of the brand’s $544.2M total. To put that in perspective, Home Depot garnered $117.7M EMV in 2023. So posts from creators specifically calling out their Amazon Home Storefronts garnered slightly more EMV than all posts mentioning Home Depot in 2023.
This underscores the massive scale on which Amazon is operating. It’s something that basically no brand can compete with. But it’s important to keep in mind that Amazon didn’t get there overnight. The brand has consistently empowered creators at every step, putting them front and center in Amazon’s product offerings and marketing efforts. The result? Oh, only becoming one of the most powerful companies (entities, empires, whatever you want to call it) in human history.
Not too shabby. Now let’s see if they can find me some bookshelves.
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