A members’ sale inside a family of websites.

Joss & Main is one of the brands of Wayfair, the Boston online home retailer. Wayfair, in a press release of May 2023, describes it as a specialty home retailer founded in 2011, headquartered in Boston and part of Wayfair Inc.’s portfolio of brands. English Wikipedia’s article on Wayfair places the launch slightly earlier, at the end of 2010, and describes Joss & Main as a members-only online store; we give both dates.

The parent company had a long history of running many websites at once. Wayfair’s annual report for 2014, filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, says the business began in May 2002 as Smart Tech Toys, became CSN Stores in 2003 and operated for years as hundreds of niche websites. In late 2011 it closed and redirected most of those sites and changed its name to Wayfair. Joss & Main came out of the same period, but it was built to stay separate.

Its model was different from the main Wayfair site. In the 2014 annual report Wayfair called Joss & Main “our online flash sales site that combines inspiring home design with significant savings,” and referred to the hundreds of promotional “Daily Events” it ran on the site, each promoting a selection of products for a limited time. The same report lists Joss & Main among five brands — with Wayfair.com, AllModern, DwellStudio and Birch Lane — and says Wayfair launched mobile applications for Joss & Main in 2012 and took the brand to the United Kingdom, France and Germany in 2014.

Joss & Main kept its own name, website and app throughout, rather than being merged into Wayfair.com. In the 2014 report the main Wayfair site is described separately from the flash-sale brand, and in Wayfair’s 2025 report Joss & Main still appears under its own name in the list of the company’s brands.

From flash sales to “the ultimate style edit”.

Wayfair’s own description of Joss & Main has changed over the years. By its annual report for 2025, the brand is listed among Wayfair’s family of brands — Wayfair, AllModern, Birch Lane, Joss & Main, Perigold and Wayfair Professional — with a one-line tagline: “The ultimate style edit for home.” The same report groups AllModern, Joss & Main and Perigold together as Wayfair’s specialty retail brands.

In 2014 Wayfair described the brand in terms of sales events and savings; in the 2020s it describes it in terms of editing and style. Wayfair’s May 2023 press release calls Joss & Main a retailer offering the season’s latest home trends at lower prices, with shoppers able to buy online, in the app or in person.

Joss & Main also moved off the screen. On 15 September 2022 Wayfair announced that the brand had opened its first physical store, at the Burlington Mall in Burlington, Massachusetts. The release describes the store as “powered by” Wayfair’s selection and delivery network and as a place where shoppers could shop online, in person or both, with apps, QR codes and screens giving access to the full online range beyond the pieces on the floor.

A second store followed. On 18 May 2023 Wayfair announced that Joss & Main had opened at Oakbrook Center in Oak Brook, Illinois, near Chicago. The release again described the brand as headquartered in Boston and part of Wayfair Inc.’s portfolio.

Online and catalogue home retail.

The brands in this group sell furniture and home goods mainly at a distance, through printed catalogues, websites or both. Some started as mail-order businesses that posted catalogues to customers’ homes; others began online and never printed a catalogue at all. Several belong to larger retail groups, and a single company can run more than one of these names side by side, each aimed at a different taste or budget.

Because the customer usually meets the brand before seeing any product in person, a distance retailer’s identity is carried largely by its name, its photography, its catalogue or website layout and, more recently, by the physical stores that some of these businesses have begun to open. That makes the plain questions behind each name worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and who actually makes what it sells.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time and how its look has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Arches, blonde wood, brass and black.

A well-documented part of Joss & Main’s visual identity is its store design, which Wayfair described in detail. The Burlington store, according to the September 2022 release, is organised around a central atrium of linked arches holding cash-and-carry items and the checkout, with a large arch framing the street entrance and the motif repeated through the interior. Wayfair said the arches were meant to evoke marketplaces and town squares.

The materials are spelled out too. Wayfair described blonde wood and neutral tones with brass and black accents, intended to give the store a warm, residential feel. Beside the atrium sits a Design Studio offering free design advice and hands-on materials such as swatches. The Oak Brook release of May 2023 repeats the scheme — grand arches drawn from marketplaces and bazaars around the world, warm blonde wood, brass and black — as a neutral backdrop for the merchandise.

In both releases Wayfair uses the same terms for the two stores — arches drawn from marketplaces, blonde wood, brass and black — and pairs them with the same tagline, “the ultimate style edit for home,” which also appears in Wayfair’s 2025 annual report. The Burlington release adds that the floor shows only part of the online range, with screens and QR codes linking shoppers to the rest, and that shoppers can build carts in the Joss & Main app while walking the store.

For a design guide, Joss & Main shows how a sub-brand inside a large retailer can hold a distinct personality through a name, a tagline and a repeatable store architecture. Compare Wayfair, its parent, and One Kings Lane, another home site that began with flash sales. For this guide we use blonde oak, brass, black and a warm white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Joss & Main’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.