Enjoy Your Stay

High-end hotels are entering the home furnishings realm, creating collections positioned as allowing consumers to treat themselves to the feeling of being in a fine hotel while remaining in the comfort of their own bedrooms and bathrooms. Most often, hotels sell the furniture and home textiles they feature in their guest rooms through their own direct-to-consumer channels, but they are increasingly collaborating with home goods brands or retailers to make collaborative products available to shoppers at retail as well. Some examples of the latter include:  

• Earlier this week, Pottery Barn announced a capsule collection of home goods with the Westin brand, with products billed as recreating the hotel’s “relaxing and rejuvenating sleep experience” at home. The collection includes bedroom furniture, bath accessories (body lotion, hand soap, and diffusers, plus a sleep balm), and bedding, all with Westin’s elevated, modern look. Pottery Barn, which has been supplying Westin’s Heavenly Bed mattresses for 10 years, is a brand of Williams-Sonoma, while Westin is part of Marriott Bonvoy.

• Society Social is collaborating with The Colony Palm Beach Hotel for an 11-piece furniture collection, launched last spring. The pieces are used in the 75-year-old pink hotel’s rooms, which were newly refreshed in 2023, as well as being offered to consumers on the Society Social e-commerce site. The products in the Pink Paradise Furniture Collection, described as having classic Palm Beach style, include headboards, sofas, chairs, tables, nightstands, stools, and dressers, in materials such as bamboo, rattan, wicker, and floral-patterned fabrics. More than 20 fabric choices, coordinated with paint colors from three companies, are available.

• Macy’s and its Hotel Collection private label paired in 2023 with Shash Diné Eco Retreat, an Arizona off-the-grid glamping hotel, and its CEO Baya Meehan, for a limited-edition collection of soft goods for the home. The pieces, which included blankets, comforters, quilts, towels, throws, robes, and kimonos, took their inspiration from Navajo designs; Meehan is a member of the Navajo and the resort is located on the edge of the Navajo Nation. In 2022, Macy’s Hotel Collection similarly partnered with Akwaaba Bed & Breakfast Inns, based in Brooklyn with a handful of locations on the East Coast, for a limited-edition collection of home décor including bedding, duvets, towels, robes, slippers, tea sets, glassware, serving trays, and more.

Furniture and home goods brands have been supplying products for use in hotel rooms and common areas for some time. CB2 provided furniture and accessories to The Surf Lodge in Montauk, Long Island, New York, starting in the summer 2023 season, while Arhaus supplied outdoor furniture for a refresh of the White Elephant Nantucket resort, timed to the latter’s 100th anniversary in 2023, to name just two examples. Deals such as the ones discussed above can be seen as an extension of this trend.

Hotels and labels from the worlds of fashion and interior design have also been pairing increasingly frequently for other types of collaborations. These range from fashion-branded hotels and hotel rooms, such as the Armani Hotel in Dubai or the Louis Vuitton Hotel in Paris, to hotel-branded fashion collaborations, such as Sporty & Rich’s collections with Le Bristol Paris, Sunset Tower Hotel, and Hotel Du Cap-Eden-Roc, or Frame’s two capsules with the Ritz Paris.

Partnerships for consumer fashion and home goods items give consumers access to branded products that are either aspirational or bring back pleasant memories. They also help the hotels keep their brands top of mind, especially during periods when consumers are not traveling much, as well as generating a bit of ancillary income.

In case you missed it, our detailed coverage of trends spotted at Licensing Expo has been published. You can read it here. Separately, Raugust Communications’ monthly newsletter comes out next Tuesday, June 18, 2024. The Licensing Topic of the Month will look at recent changes and challenges at mass and value retail, while the Datapoint research spotlight will assess how the size and scope of limited collaborations has changed over the past five years. If you are not yet a subscriber, you can sign up here.