Soho Home’s E-Commerce Playbook: From Club Culture to Curated Living

For many, Soho House is a member-only escape intimate, design-forward, and deeply rooted in cultural cachet. But what happens when you try to translate that physical experience into a direct-to-consumer interiors brand?

Camilla Mackay-Wilson, Head of E-Commerce at Soho Home, is solving exactly that challenge. Speaking at Shoptalk Europe, she detailed the brand’s global ambitions, operational constraints, and the nuanced digital strategy required to bring “the feel of the house” into customers’ homes.

From Club to Consumer: Scaling an Interior-First Identity

While Soho House is synonymous with exclusivity and design, many still don’t realise it has an interiors arm, let alone one open to non-members. Soho Home retails furniture, lighting, textiles and decor inspired by, and often mirroring the interiors of the Houses.

Whilst some pieces are like for like as in-house items, others borrow from the mood, durability, and maximalist aesthetic of Soho House properties. This isn’t just thematic branding. It’s a tangible strategy that invites customers to recreate the layered, lived-in elegance of the clubs without needing a membership.

Soho Home uses visual storytelling across homepage design and PDPs to explain this context, guiding customers through concepts like “layered lighting” or material sourcing to bring Soho’s interior philosophy into personal spaces.

Logistics as Loyalty: Unlocking Growth Markets

One of Soho Home’s biggest operational levers this year is shipping accessibility. With Soho Houses opening as far afield as São Paulo and Mexico City, interest from international markets has surged but conversion has lagged due to high fulfillment costs.

To solve this, Soho Home is opening a new warehouse in Europe to improve cost efficiency and shorten delivery times. As Mackay-Wilson explained, removing shipping friction is essential for long-term brand expansion, especially in regions where the physical club experience hasn’t yet created brand familiarity.

The conversion math supports it: customers may only buy a sofa every few years, but rugs, cushions, tableware, and home fragrance items drive more regular repeat purchases if the shipping barrier is removed.

Membership as a Merch Engine

Soho Home benefits from two distinct but overlapping audiences: House members and a broader tier of Friends customers who receive perks such as 15% off product, early sale access, decreased shipping pricing and personalised communications.

The result? 70–80% of Soho Home customers hold one of these memberships. Friends may have never stayed in a Soho House, but their participation creates a deeper brand affinity and more predictable revenue. The program is priced so that even a single large-ticket purchase makes the annual membership worthwhile.

This structure not only rewards loyalty but also accelerates awareness in new markets where the Soho House brand might be known in name only.

Platform Choice for Premium Complexity

Soho Home has opted for D3R over more ubiquitous platforms like Shopify largely due to the complexity of its offering. Modular sofas, pre-order configurations, and wardrobe customisations demand a tailored, high-end digital environment.

D3R supports a curated front-end experience and a scalable back-end, capable of handling unique fulfillment rules, nuanced product logic, and intricate merchandising flows.

Data-Backed Design: From Scroll Depth to Conversion

Mackay-Wilson emphasised the team’s investment in ContentSquare for behavioural analytics. One surprising discovery? On mobile devices, product pages with detailed descriptions often pushed the 'Add to Bag' button below the fold, a design oversight that went unnoticed until scroll-depth data flagged the issue.

This insight sparked a redesign of Soho Home’s PDPs, ensuring premium storytelling didn’t come at the cost of usability.

Personalization With Purpose

Using platforms like Salesforce alongside DEPT, Soho Home personalises its CRM communications with product carousels tailored to customer behaviour. An out-of-stock notification for a lamp, for example, might include recommendations for matching accessories based on previous browsing or peer purchases.

These aren’t empty upsells, they’re editorial-style cues that extend the brand’s storytelling and inspire customers to return.

The Studio as Store: A Quiet Bet on Experiential Retail

While Soho Home only has traditional store footprints in London and four locations in the US, its studios and club locations serve as tactile brand stages. Customers can touch, sit, and experience products firsthand without the need for a transaction. Some studios include coffee shops or host design events to deepen engagement.

This mirrors lessons from other experiential leaders at Shoptalk—such as Canada Goose’s cold rooms or Rituals’ flagship experiences. In each case, in-person immersion becomes a trust-builder, especially for high-price-point categories.

A Final Takeaway From Shoptalk

As a trail runner herself, Mackay-Wilson noted the keynote from HOKA’s founder left a mark not just for the story, but the way product came from personal use and purpose.

It echoed back to Soho Home’s philosophy: design should be grounded in experience. Whether it’s a rug in a club lounge or a modular sofa in a customer’s home, the emotional connection must hold. Interior design is an expression of culture and design, bringing storytelling into our living spaces.

Independently Created. Not affiliated with Shoptalk.

Unofficially Shoptalk is a ClickZ Media publication in the Events division