Wholesale strategy for interior brands: the 2027 playbook

Five years ago a buyer met a brand rep, drank a coffee and placed an order for the next three to six months.

Today that meeting starts with a request for five Excel sheets and an order suggestion. If the brand has neither, the buyer orders what they ordered last time. Or nothing.

I sat on the buyer side for seven years, running purchasing at an online design retailer. This playbook is what I would tell any interior brand planning its wholesale for 2027.

Decide what wholesale is for

Pick one primary goal. Sales or brand.

If the goal is sales, go broad. Large online retailers, cross-border players, anyone with volume running through them.

If the goal is brand, go narrow. A handful of partners where being stocked says something about you.

Most brands say both. That is where it falls apart. The two goals want different partners and a different pitch. Decide which one wins when they collide, and write it down.

Choose the market you open and the market you protect

Your strongest market is usually the wrong place to start.

If your own webshop already works at home, ten domestic retailers mostly move revenue you already had, at a lower margin. Use wholesale to open markets you cannot reach alone.

A pattern that works for many interior brands:

• Physical retail at home. Where brand matters and you already have presence.
• Large online partners abroad. They move volume, they give you data fast, and they do not think in countries. Pitch them as a European partner.

Build a list of 50. Start with 10.

Look at where your five closest competitors are stocked. That list has already been filtered by someone else’s buying team.

Fifty is the research target. Ten is where you start, so you learn what partners ask for before forty of them are asking.

The first three to five partners matter more than the next thirty. Once you land one, use it. Buyers watch each other.

Expect concentration and plan for it

Wholesale revenue piles up at the top. At one furniture brand we work with, 35 partners drive 70% of wholesale revenue. A lighting brand we work with gets up to 80% from its top five partners, and one person runs all of its sales.

Distribution is thin across the market too. We mapped 1,185 brands across Europe’s six largest online interior retailers. 792 of them are carried by only one of the six. Only 104 are carried by four or more.

So the job is depth before breadth. Get your best products in stock at your best partners. Then widen.

Know the state of your listings

Most brands can tell you their ROAS, AOV and CAC to the decimal. Very few can tell you how much of their bestselling range is in stock at their top 20 partners right now.

That number decides your wholesale. In a September 2026 scan of 5,169 hero products, only about 1 in 4 was actually buyable at the retailer. For every 100 that could be listed, 63 were carried and around 26 were in stock.

At one lighting brand, every product showing as backordered at its retail partners was sitting in the brand’s own warehouse. The stock existed. Nobody had sold it in.

Read more in how to track inventory at your retail partners.

Five moves for 2027

1. Start with your top 100 SKUs. This is where the fastest money sits. When a new brand joins Atlo, we find between €50,000 and €600,000 in unrealized sales on its top 100 products alone.
2. Track stock coverage per partner, every week. Look at each partner on its own. The same brand can be 51% in stock at one retailer and 4% at the next. The average hides the partner that is losing you sales.
3. Send order suggestions instead of check-in calls. When our customers asked their retail partners whether to keep sending order proposals, 78% said yes. See how to suggest the right quantities.
4. Launch novelties on one shared date. Get your top partners to list and buy at the same time. In our data the newest launches are in stock at 33% of listings, against 50% for the established range.
5. Bring data to every contact. If you have nothing a partner can use, do not call. If you do, call more often.

Measure the channel honestly

Total wholesale revenue hides what you need to know. Track these instead:

• Stock coverage on hero products, per partner. Set a target, for example 80%, and chase the gap.
• Sell-through, not only sell-in. Sell-in is what you shipped. Sell-through is what sold.
• Reorder rate. A partner who orders once was a transaction. A partner who reorders is a channel.
• Incremental revenue by market. So you can see if wholesale grew the business or moved it.

Give it an owner

Wholesale fails most often when everyone agrees it matters and nobody has hours for it.

Put one name on it. Do the first outreach yourself if you are the founder. Hire once you have around 20 partners and know what you are hiring for.

Around 20 to 30 partners, a spreadsheet stops working. Nobody knows what each partner has listed, what is in stock where, and someone spends a large part of the week opening partner websites by hand. That is the point where a system pays for itself.

The new age of wholesale is the same game at a much bigger scale. The brands that use the data will win it.

See your own numbers

We build a free stock and price report on your top products and your retail partners. You see stock coverage, out-of-stock listings and unrealized sales per partner.

Book a demo with a founder

Sources

Atlo data from the brands we work with, 2025 to 2026. Hero product scan: September 2026, top 10% volume products, 5,169 SKUs. Retail coverage scan: August 2026, 1,185 brands across six online interior retailers. All brands and retailers anonymised.