The Rise of the Lifestyle Marketplace

If you follow DTC brand news, it would’ve been hard to miss all the coverage of Brooklinen’s Spaces by Brooklinen marketplace last week. My favorite piece was this WSJ one because it points out that Brooklinen is selling similarly sustainable brands like Floyd and specifically helping customers “complete the look” for on-brand room styles like Relaxed Industrial and Earthy Minimalist. That’s the right way to approach this strategy.

Why am I excited about the idea of brands known for fairly narrow product categories launching curated marketplaces? For three broad reasons:

First, a cross-category, multi-brand marketplace can tell a story in a way that selling one brand of linens doesn’t — and then it lets customers buy the lifestyle behind the story. Sure, a brand can photograph complete rooms for styling purposes, but that brand won’t get the full credit as a source for lifestyle design if all it has are props. And picturing a lot of non-sellable items is likely to set a customer service team up for lots of queries about where to buy what.

Second, customers are increasingly looking to brands they love as influencers, and even as editors, for their lives. This presents a new opportunity for brands to monetize an existing audience (which Web Smith calls linear commerce) but also grow the audience and deepens the sense of community by becoming more broadly influential and therefore attractively sticky. And the SEO boost that can come with offering more products doesn’t hurt. Product breadth that supports storytelling - and sales - is also useful for other forms of marketing, such as e-mail and CRM.

Finally, extended assortments can drive major volume. But for a relatively small brand, it rarely makes sense to complicate the supply chain with product category expansion. Leaning on a marketplace model checks boxes one and two above - if done well - without introducing vertical manufacturing risk nor the burden of carrying broad inventory. And, as the WSJ points out in the case of Brooklinen, a marketplace can still comprise half of a company’s revenue.

Notably, Brooklinen is merchandising Spaces even above Sheets on its home page, below. So this isn’t an insignificant play for them. And that presence is backed up by serious shoppability across categories including decor (even plants and books), art, furniture, and lighting.

For disclosure, RevCascade, a company I’ve advised since 2016, powers this marketplace. Ask me for an intro if you’d like to learn more about how.