It didn’t fit.

The colour looked completely different in your living room.

You ordered two by mistake.

Or maybe you simply changed your mind.

So you arranged a return. A van arrived. The chair disappeared.

Refund received. Story over.

Except it isn’t.

For the chair, things have just become considerably more complicated.

Furniture isn’t a T-shirt

Returns are part of modern retail. We’re used to ordering things, trying them and sending them back when they’re not quite right.

But returning a jumper and returning a three-seater sofa are two very different logistical exercises.

Furniture is big. It’s heavy. It’s expensive to move and awkward to store.

Once it comes back, somebody also needs to work out what condition it’s in.

Has it been assembled?

Is the original packaging still intact?

Has it picked up a mark during delivery?

Are all the pieces there?

Can it go straight back into stock?

Does it need inspecting, cleaning, repackaging or repairing first?

And then comes another important question:

Where does it get sold now?

Returned doesn’t mean ruined

This is probably the biggest misconception around returned furniture.

A return doesn’t automatically mean there is something wrong with the product.

Sometimes there is.

But sometimes the customer simply ordered the wrong thing.

Perhaps the sofa wouldn’t fit through the door.

The table was too large for the room.

The colour wasn’t quite what they expected.

They changed their mind.

Or the packaging was opened before they realised they’d ordered the wrong size.

The furniture itself might still be perfectly good.

Commercially, though, something has changed.

It may no longer fit neatly into the retailer’s normal route for selling brand-new stock.

Then there are all the things that were never really ‘returns’

Customer returns are only part of the story.

Furniture and homeware businesses can also find themselves with:

• ex-display pieces
• photography and styling samples
• cancelled orders
• discontinued ranges
• excess stock
• products with damaged packaging
• manufacturing seconds
• items with minor cosmetic imperfections

They’re all different.

But they have one thing in common.

They still exist.

The materials have already been sourced. The product has already been manufactured. The energy has already been used.

So the sensible thing is surely to find someone who wants it.

The awkward space between brand new and second-hand

Retail is exceptionally good at selling brand-new products.

We have entire systems designed around it.

Warehouses. Websites. Packaging. Distribution networks. Advertising.

Things become more complicated once a product doesn’t fit neatly into the ‘brand new’ box.

That’s the space we find particularly interesting.

Because something doesn’t suddenly lose its purpose because its cardboard box has been opened.

A tiny scratch on the back of a cabinet doesn’t stop it storing your glasses.

A dining table doesn’t become useless because somebody ordered it and discovered it was 20cm too wide.

And an ex-display chair doesn’t forget how to be a chair.

We probably need to rethink perfection, too

Part of creating a better system for returned furniture is operational.

But part of it is cultural.

We’ve become accustomed to expecting perfection from new things.

No marks. No history. Original packaging.

And yet within weeks of living with something, life inevitably starts happening to it.

Someone puts a glass down without a coaster.

The vacuum cleaner catches a leg.

The dog investigates it.

You move house.

Suddenly that microscopic imperfection doesn’t seem particularly important.

Buying returned or imperfect furniture doesn’t mean ignoring condition.

It means understanding the condition and deciding whether it matters to you.

That’s a very different proposition.

A return should be a change of direction, not the end

People aren’t going to stop returning furniture.

Nor should they.

Sometimes something simply isn’t right.

Retailers will also continue having surplus stock, cancelled orders, samples and discontinued products.

The opportunity is what happens next.

Instead of thinking of these products as a problem to dispose of, we can start thinking about how to get them back into circulation.

Because somewhere, there’s probably another person looking for exactly that chair.

They just haven’t met yet.

That’s one of the reasons we built Lagom Hem.

A marketplace designed to help returned, imperfect, surplus and pre-owned furniture and homeware find another home.

Because returned doesn’t mean ruined.

Sometimes it simply means ready for somewhere else.