RH, the company formerly known as Restoration Hardware, just announced revenues across its “ecosystem of products, places, services and spaces” rose 19% in third quarter 2021, exceeding $1 billion in sales.

That brings year-to-date revenues to $2.86 billion, just ahead of $2.85 billion generated in all of 2020. This was accomplished despite the year’s supply-chain challenges, as it bettered pre-pandemic 2019 third-quarter revenues by nearly 50%.

These results gave RH confidence to raise fiscal 2021 revenue guidance to 32% to 33% and adjusted operating margin in the range of 25.3% to 25.5%.

Calling fiscal 2021 guidance “conservative” due to uncertainties around the emergence of the new Omicron variant, postponing the opening of its San Francisco Gallery until next Spring and continued delays in the supply chain, CEO Gary Friedman is anything but conservative when it comes to next year.

Recounting the challenges of operating under the Covid cloud in 2020 and 2021, Friedman said in a statement, “Let this be remembered as the time RH unleashed the greatest display of innovation our industry has ever seen. That’s why we refer to 2022, as ‘The Year of the New.’”

As per usual, Friedman didn’t waste a lot of time in the earnings call talking about where RH has been. Instead, his remarks were about where RH is going.

“Vision leads the leader and leaders have to be comfortable making others uncomfortable,” he said in the earnings call. “You’re taking people somewhere that you’ve never been, doing things you’ve never done. We spend a lot of time thinking until we can see what others can’t see, so we can do what others can’t do.”

Based upon what Friedman sees ahead for next year, it is sure to make RH’s competitors uncomfortable.

Finding new customers, that is what 57 percent of high-end and luxury home furnishings marketers report as their number one business challenge in a recent survey conducted by Unity Marketing. No other issue comes close.

Their search for new customers ends here: It’s the HENRYs — high-earners-not-rich-yet consumers — especially the young HENRYs, aged 24-44 years.

This book, Home for HENRYs: Meet the New Customers Home Décor Marketers Are Searching For, reveals where home marketers can find their best and brightest new customer prospects and how to connect with them: Young HENRYs – high-earners-not-rich-yet consumers.

Everyone has heard the adage, “The bigger the challenges, the greater the opportunity,” but often the reverse is true too: The bigger the opportunity, the greater the challenges. Both apply for home brands that aim to grow in the U.S. consumer market.“

Here are the five biggest challenges that every home furnishings brand faces entering or expanding in the U.S. market, whether selling through brick-and-mortar retail, B2C e-commerce or through the design trade.

While most businesses are entranced by the growth opportunities in China – 1.4 billion people with GDP growth averaging ~9% per year since 1980 – the U.S. market is far larger in market size yet with only one-fourth the total number of consumers – 328 million people living in 138 million U.S. households. The U.S. economy leads the world, $21.4 trillion as compared with $14.3 trillion in China, according to The World Bank.

In reality, China may be the world’s biggest producer, but the U.S. is the biggest consumer market.

Further, the U.S. is where more of the world’s wealth resides. There are 20.6 million U.S. millionaires, more than the five next largest countries combined, including China’s 2.3 million millionaires.

As for the home furnishings market, Americans spent $380.7 billion in 2020 on goods for their home, including $238.8 billion on furniture and furnishings alone. Add to that the $90.4 billion spent on home services, and the total market opportunity in the U.S. is rapidly approaching a half-trillion dollars.