Cozey, the Montreal-based furniture startup that built its business selling modular sofas through a direct-to-consumer model, opened its Los Angeles pop-up today at 1333 Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice — a roughly 5,000-square-foot space that will run through December. It's the brand's second-largest U.S. market and its first physical location on the West Coast.

The opening is part of a broader physical retail push that Modern Retail reports reflects where the brand sees its future: not just online, but in showrooms where customers can experience furniture before buying it. Cozey has previously held two pop-ups in New York City, in 2024 and 2025, and is planning a permanent New York location for early 2027 alongside a Montreal flagship. "We're going after Ikea," founder Alex Aubé told Modern Retail. "It's going to take us 25 years, maybe 30 years, but that's the goal."

The DTC-to-Physical Pivot in Home Goods

Cozey's strategy is increasingly common — and increasingly necessary. The DTC furniture playbook of the early 2020s, built around Instagram advertising and free returns, ran into the reality that furniture is one of the categories where consumers most want to sit, touch, and feel before committing. Returns on large furniture items are expensive. Conversion rates for high-ticket items without a physical touchpoint are challenging. And in a softening home goods environment where consumers are being more deliberate about purchases, the trust-building that a physical showroom provides matters more than ever.

Retail TouchPoints notes that Cozey launched in 2020 and built its brand around what it calls "functional, modular" furniture — pieces designed to be moved and reconfigured as living spaces change. The brand's appeal is partly about flexibility and partly about value: quality furniture at prices that sit comfortably between IKEA's entry level and the design-forward brands that cost multiples more.

That positioning matters as the home goods market faces headwinds. High mortgage rates have suppressed the move-driven purchases that fuel furniture buying. Chain Store Age notes that Cozey is expanding specifically in markets — New York and Los Angeles — where urban density means consumers are buying furniture more frequently for apartments they expect to leave, which plays to the modularity message.

Why LA, Why Now

Cozey says Los Angeles is already its second-largest U.S. market by online sales volume, which makes the pop-up less of an experiment and more of a validation play. The Abbot Kinney location — in a neighborhood with high foot traffic, design-conscious consumers, and proximity to the Venice and West Hollywood retail corridors — is a deliberate choice to attract exactly the kind of buyer who already knows Cozey from online ads but wants to see the product in person before making a $2,000 sectional decision.

The pop-up-to-permanent path is a model that's worked for a growing number of DTC brands. It lets the company test market-specific demand with limited fixed overhead before committing to a lease. New York's repeat pop-ups — 2024 and 2025 — clearly generated enough confidence to greenlight the permanent store planned for 2027.

The IKEA Ambition in Context

Aubé's IKEA comment is partly aspiration and partly marketing, but it's also a coherent competitive frame. IKEA's dominance in affordable, functional furniture is real but not absolute — the brand has struggled in North America with the same physical density limitations that Cozey is trying to solve through a different model. IKEA requires massive stores in suburban locations; Cozey is targeting urban showrooms in dense markets where IKEA's footprint is thin.

The 25-to-30-year timeline is honest. Building a furniture retail brand with the recognition and logistics infrastructure to genuinely compete with IKEA is a multi-decade project. But for a brand that launched in 2020 and is already opening its second U.S. market in year six, the trajectory is notable.

In an industry where the narrative has been heavily skewed toward closures and consolidation, a DTC brand opening stores because the demand is there is a different kind of retail story. Today, that story is unfolding on Abbot Kinney Boulevard.