The Homegrown Furniture Company That Wants to Be Bigger Than Ikea

Each box from Cozey, mattresses aside, must weigh under 50 pounds and measure less than 330 centimetres around—right on the cusp of when couriers like FedEx starts charging extra. These parameters guide designers at the company's headquarters near Royalmount before anyone sketches an armrest.

"Those constraints are at the heart of our design," says founder and CEO Frédéric Aubé. They are also, if you take him at his word, how a six-year-old Montreal company intends to overtake Ikea.

The reasoning is that boxes that size let Cozey fit more sofas into every shipping container and every warehouse aisle, and they go out by regular courier instead of a furniture truck to keep prices down (and make it up a walk-up staircase or into a condo elevator), and the sofa can grow one module at a time.

Aubé, 29, has said this before in one form or another: The goal is to become the largest furniture retailer in the world over the next 25 to 30 years. "Let's beat Ikea" became the internal shorthand, he explains, because nobody could picture what "largest furniture retailer" meant, but everybody can picture Ikea. Now that a Cozey store opened at 1020 Sainte-Catherine West on September 24, it’s been pitched as a homecoming for what was once a DTC (direct-to-consumer) company selling sofas through a screen.

As Cozey puts money into storefronts, Ikea by contrast is working toward the same idea from the other end, first known for 300,000-square-foot warehouses at the edge of town and now opening compact stores in city centres for browsing a slimmed-down inventory and ordering the rest for delivery. What’s more, a string of online brands have found that a lease is much harder to scale than a website.

How Cozey handles the move, starting in the one Canadian city where it admits it hasn't caught on, will show whether beating Ikea is a plan or a slogan.

Nothing to carry out

Nothing leaves the Sainte-Catherine showroom except fabric swatches. Buy a sofa on the floor or from your own couch a week later, and it ships to your door either way. The staff aren't paid on commission in stores like Aubé likens to playgrounds.

Their job, he says, isn't to introduce Cozey to strangers. "We're not starting a fire with our store. We're putting gas on a fire that's already burning," the CEO says.

The company only opens where people already buy online, then watches sales climb across the whole province. It happened in British Columbia after Vancouver and in Alberta after Calgary. Toronto, home to the first store, is still the biggest market. This is why Montreal came fourth, as Toronto was already Cozey's biggest region when it got the first store, and Sainte-Catherine, still torn up by construction, had nowhere worth opening.

The stores change what people buy: Shoppers walk in set on the bestseller and leave with a different model. Average order size barely moves, Aubé says; what changes is the mix. Every location files a daily report on what customers ask about, right down to whether the seats feel too deep.

"It just makes us better merchants," Aubé says.

Even with storefronts sitting empty downtown, landing the right address wasn't easy. The best retail blocks are in high demand everywhere Cozey looks, Aubé says, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles included, while the next tier down struggles to fill. He's betting his stretch comes back first.

"Now that the work has been completed on our side of the street, Sainte-Catherine looks beautiful," he says.

Give it two or three years, he figures, and nobody will be saying downtown is dead.

Shrinking toward the same idea

Ikea has been reaching similar conclusions. Its classic suburban stores carry around 10,000 products and assume you own a car and have nothing planned for the rest of your Saturday. Its city formats are a fraction of that: Downtown Toronto got a 65,000-square-foot version in 2022, and a 43,000-square-foot store is moving into a former Hudson's Bay at a London, Ontario, mall this fall. Ikea's smallest planning studios hold no stock at all. The company has said cities with these stores see more online orders and more traffic at the big boxes.

That sounds a lot like Cozey's pitch, but the difference lies in the starting point. Cozey started online and is adding rooms on top, and meanwhile, Ikea is trimming down a model built on cheap land at the edge of town and warehouses you navigate yourself. The trimming hasn't always worked: its small store at Scarborough Town Centre closed this year after less than three years, with the company citing a thin product range and shoppers drifting online.

Not that Aubé underestimates the competition. "Ikea is a fantastic competitor," he says. "They're very clear on who they are. They have the best prices in the industry." Its scale and supply chain, he adds, are hard to touch.