Williams-Sonoma’s modern brand started on paper.

West Elm began as a catalogue. The Los Angeles Times reported on 16 July 2005 that Williams-Sonoma Inc. launched West Elm in 2002 and then followed its well-established catalogue-to-store tradition in the autumn of 2003, when it opened a store in Brooklyn. English Wikipedia’s article on Williams-Sonoma gives the same order of events: a catalogue in 2002 and a first store the following year. Williams-Sonoma, the San Francisco company behind the Williams Sonoma cookware shops and Pottery Barn, has owned West Elm since its launch in 2002, and Wikipedia describes West Elm as a wholly owned subsidiary.

The neighbourhood mattered from the start. Business of Home quoted a West Elm spokesperson in August 2016 saying that Dumbo is where the brand was born in 2002, and that its opening store, in 2003, stood at the corner of Front Street and Main Street. Fast Company described West Elm in March 2014 as a Brooklyn-based retailer, a contrast with its parent’s home in San Francisco.

The Los Angeles Times named Lisa Versacio as West Elm’s creator, and reported in 2005 that she had left the company two years earlier and had since been hired by Restoration Hardware. Her successor in charge of the young chain was Dave DeMattei, Williams-Sonoma’s president of emerging brands, whom the paper described as a former head of retailers such as Banana Republic, J. Crew and Coach. DeMattei told the newspaper that West Elm was trying to develop “a modern aesthetic for the masses”, and that the chain, originally aimed at futon owners in their twenties and thirties, was reaching a much broader range of customers.

That 2005 report also set out what the early range looked like: modular seating, geometric bookcases and low platform beds, far from the slip-covered style associated with Pottery Barn. DeMattei said that at the beginning the brand was “pretty edgy”, with a colour palette that was “all purple and green”, and that people could not always picture it in their homes. Under his direction, the paper reported, designers raised some of the low furniture, offered pieces in light wood alongside the brand’s trademark chocolate finish and upgraded fabrics and sheets.

Lofts, brick and a back room full of sofas.

West Elm’s shops were designed to look like homes in a converted warehouse. The Los Angeles Times reported in 2005 that the stores, regardless of location, looked like lofts, with exposed brick walls and recycled-wood floors, and that the sales staff dressed in black. Rooms were arranged on small platforms the company called “apartments”, with merchandise on the shelves around them, and furniture down to bed frames and couches was kept in the back room so that customers could take it home the same day. By then the chain had stores in Corte Madera and San Diego in California and in the Chelsea district of New York, and planned openings in Santa Monica, Atlanta, Houston, Washington and Princeton, New Jersey.

A competitor offered an early critique. Bette Kahn, a spokeswoman for Crate & Barrel, told the paper that West Elm had “great color and great ideas”, but “just one look”. The brand’s answer, a decade later, was to add texture and handwork. Fast Company reported on 27 March 2014 that Jim Brett, who became West Elm’s president in 2010 after heading home merchandising at Anthropologie, set out to replace what he called “brown boxes”: low, angular, chocolate-finished pieces. The magazine noted that even the West Elm logo of that period sat inside a pair of overlapping squares.

Brett’s team pushed designers towards curves, a more global look and signature pieces in reclaimed woods, according to Fast Company, and sourced handcrafted textiles from countries such as Nepal. West Elm also invited sellers from Etsy into its world: the magazine said ten Etsy sellers appeared in the January 2011 catalogue, followed by pop-up events in the stores. In 2012 the team launched West Elm Market, a kitchen and home-goods offshoot with a La Colombe coffee bar, and in 2013 the brand made a public commitment with the Clinton Global Initiative to source handmade products.

Wikipedia says the first West Elm stores outside the United States opened in Canada, beginning with Toronto in October 2008, and that in Mexico the stores are operated by the retail group El Puerto de Liverpool. Business of Home reported in 2016 that West Elm also ran shop-in-shops inside the British department store John Lewis.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are American home-furnishings retailers: store and catalogue chains that sell furniture, tableware, lighting and decorative goods under their own names. A retailer of this kind usually designs or commissions much of what it sells and has it made by outside suppliers, so the name on the shopping bag is often the same name that appears on the product itself.

For a home-furnishings retailer, identity is carried less by any single object than by the whole experience around it: the wordmark over the door, the catalogue that arrives in the post, the way a room is staged on the shop floor or on a website, and the bag a customer carries home. Because these companies are often owned by larger groups, sold, merged or rebuilt after hard years, the questions behind each name are worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where the goods it sells are designed and made.

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

Back to Brooklyn, out to offices and makers.

In 2016 West Elm went home. Business of Home reported on 8 August 2016 that the brand was opening a store in Dumbo at Empire Stores, a new waterfront building in Brooklyn Bridge Park, as the centre’s anchor tenant. The spokesperson said the site had once been home to Arbuckle Bros. Coffee Co., and that the store design kept reminders of its past as a coffee warehouse: wood salvaged from the original atrium was reused for a loft floor, the original columns and rafters were left with their tally marks and writing, and a mural of the Brooklyn Bridge made from reclaimed barn siding and pine hung behind the cash register. A coffee bar inside the store’s West Elm Market section was to be operated by Brooklyn Roasters.

The same interview listed other directions the brand had taken. Since 2013, the spokesperson said, the West Elm LOCAL programme had put the work of makers, designers and artists into its stores, and in 2015 West Elm moved into the contract market with West Elm Workspace, a line of contract-grade office furniture, flooring and accessories. Wikipedia adds that in 2020 West Elm released a black-and-white home decor collection with the designer Rochelle Porter, and lists stores in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Australia, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia and India. Williams-Sonoma Inc. continues to own the brand, which Wikipedia lists alongside Williams Sonoma, Pottery Barn, Mark and Graham and Rejuvenation in its parent’s portfolio.

The name itself is written the brand’s own way. Wikipedia notes that West Elm is stylised as “west elm”, all in lower case. Fast Company recorded one change in the mark itself: by its account, the earlier logo sat inside a pair of overlapping squares, part of the boxy, chocolate-toned look that Jim Brett set out to soften after 2010. In the stores, the Los Angeles Times described in 2005 the same materials that later framed the Dumbo flagship: brick, wood and furniture shown in room sets rather than in rows.

For a design guide, West Elm shows how a retailer can be defined by its rooms as much as by its mark: a Brooklyn loft aesthetic, a chocolate-wood beginning and a later turn towards handmade texture, all under a lower-case wordmark. Compare its sibling under the same parent in our Pottery Barn brand guidelines and the company that owns both in our Williams-Sonoma brand guidelines. For this guide we use chocolate wood, brick red and loft plaster with a clean sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep West Elm’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.