At Home, a super-sized home decor store, opens in Wayne This Texas chain believes in going big when it sells home furnishings.

Joan Verdon | NorthJersey

Show Caption Hide Caption At Home, a super-sized home decor store, opens in Wayne. At Home, a super-sized home decor store, opens first northern NJ location in Willowbrook Plaza in Wayne.

At Home is located at 77 Willowbrook Blvd., across from Willowbrook Mall.

The store sells outdoor and indoor furniture, rugs, housewares and other items.

The parent company, At Home Group, Inc., trades on the New York Stock Exchange as HOME.

Picture a store with 10,000 patio cushions, throw pillows, and pet beds. A store with so many area rugs that one wall is devoted just to kitchen rugs. Another wall is dedicated to door mats. There are hundreds of bar stools, decorative vases, picture frames, plates, glasses, baskets, and almost every item sold under the home furnishings category.

Welcome to At Home, a home decor store on steroids.

The Texas-based retail chain opened its first North Jersey store - and its first entry into the New York metropolitan region - at 77 Willowbrook Blvd., in Wayne this week. At Home calls itself "the Home Decor Superstore" but this is a super-sized version of a superstore. A typical At Home is bigger than a HomeGoods, Pier One, and Pottery Barn combined.

The store opened to the public Wednesday and shoppers are already reacting in a big way.

"It's huge"

"This is crazy. Just crazy," said Nicole Serapiglia of Wayne on Thursday, as she checked out the assortment of bar stools and kitchen stools available. "It's huge."

A friend had told her about the store and posted pictures on Facebook, and she stopped by on the way to work. She left with four stools, "but I'm going to come back here and look for more stuff," she said. "This store is insane. I need to come back here when I have time."

At a time when many retailers are shrinking their stores, and deciding that smaller is better, At Home is going big, and expanding rapidly.

"The massive of size of At Home is what makes it a bit of an anomaly among its competitors in the home furnishings space today," said Jennifer Marks, editor-in-chief of Home Textiles Today. "At Home is a walloping big superstore of a size a lot of other national chains have abandoned – or at least aren’t replicating any more in their contemporary models," she said.

At Home's strategy is to out-do the competition in selection and in-stock offerings. Its stores typically are about 110,000 square feet, which makes them four times the size of a HomeGoods or Homesense, and six times as large as a Pottery Barn. It also goes up against discounters like HomeGoods and Homesense, which are owned by the parent company behind T.J Maxx and Marshalls, with "flash find" promotions for special deals, and competitive pricing.

The Wayne store, at 82,000 square feet, is a bit smaller than the average At Home, but to make up for that the shelves are stacked higher to be able to stock the same amount of merchandise.

Repeat decorators

The chain's target customers are women who view their homes as "a representation and extension of who she is" and who see decorating as "a continuous, ever-evolving process," something to do over and over again, according to a corporate statement.

"The average customer is going to spend about two hours in here," said Rob Meurer, store director in Wayne. "She will walk around and do her own shopping and bring pillows over to see how they look with other things, and spend some time here," he said.

The Wayne store is At Home's first move into Northern New Jersey and the New York metropolitan market. It is its second store in New Jersey. It opened its first New Jersey store in November in Cherry Hill.

Martha Fava, of Caldwell, also was shopping at the store Thursday. Her sister was the friend who tipped off Serapiglia to the new store. "My sister was driving by yesterday and she sent me a text that said 'What is this?' Then next thing you know she's sending me pictures and saying 'I'm shaking and I can't even get through the whole store,'" she said.

When she arrived at the store, Fava also was amazed at the size, "I walked in and my heart was pounding," she said. "This is so organized. So neat. And they literally have everything."

"It's like a one stop shop," Fava said, "We kind of needed something like this. I don't have time to go to this store and this store and that store."

Tough market

The home furnishings category is highly competitive, according to research and data firm IBISworld. Large national chains are cutting into sales of smaller stores, and mass merchants like Walmart and Target, as well as home specialty stores are vying for the same customers. Bed Bath & Beyond has the lion's share of the market, at 34 percent. according to IBISworld. HomeGoods, which has been expanding aggressively, along with its spin-off sister chain, Homesense, has a 15 percent market share, according to IBISworld.

Home furnishing sales are expected to increase in coming years as disposable household increases, along with home sales.

At Home has 159 stores in 34 states. The public company, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol HOME, tells investors it believes it has the potential to grow to as many as 600 stores in the United States.

It had net sales of $950.5 million in the fiscal year that ended January 27, up 24 percent over the previous year. It added 26 stores in 2017 and it expects to open 31 this year according to financial filings, with net sales of over $1 billion.