Why Every Celebrity Has a Home Goods Brand Now

For a house you’ll likely never set foot in, you might feel intimately familiar with Kim Kardashian’s monochromatic Hidden Hills mansion, designed by Belgian architect Axel Vervoodt (in collaboration with several other international designers, including her ex husband, Kanye West). Either you’ve seen it on an episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, her new show, The Kardashians, on her Instagram, or through home tours with Architectural Digest or Vogue. The home’s neutral tones and clean lines call to mind otherworldly landscapes from Dune, whether it be the blonde wood kitchen block or giant orb vases. In her Vogue tour, Kardashian says: "Everything in my house is really minimal. There’s so much chaos out in the world that when I come home, I want it to be just really quiet and I want everything to feel calming." For her, calm translates to "everything beige"—or "greige" if she’s feeling adventurous. 

Kardashian’s empire—which already includes her shapewear and loungewear brand, SKIMS, and her recently launched skincare line, SKKN BY KIM—expanded on Thursday to include select home goods presumably designed around this same sense of calm and wellness (that’s fancy talk for "the bathroom"). The five-piece collection includes a concrete-poured waste basket ($129), tissue box ($89), round container ($69), vanity tray ($65), and canister ($65). For $355, you can buy the whole bundle. Fans of Kardashian’s aesthetic will appreciate the cold minimalism, with every product looking like something you’d find at a chic desert spa or in a very sexy concrete parking garage. 

With this expansion, Kardashian joins a growing, though time-tested, cadre of celebrities who’ve branched out into home goods in the past decade: Drew Barrymore’s Flower Home is sold at Walmart, Kelly Clarkson has a line with online furniture giant Wayfair, The Hills’s Lauren Conrad hawks everything from nursery pillows and crib sheets to miniature paper houses for your Christmas village at Kohl’s. Reese Witherspoon’s Draper James sells cutesy napkins and stemless wine glasses etched with "Cheers, y’all!" Then, of course, there’s the grande dame of aspirational lifestyle brands, Gwyneth Paltrow, who not only peddles pots and pans alongside occasionally questionable health advice on Goop, but has also partnered with CB2 on a breezy home collection of organic-shaped furniture and bird-patterned dishware. Even before then, major stars in the lifestyle space, like Rachael Ray and Martha Stewart, identified the value of launching their own home collections. But there’s been a notable uptick in recent years, probably due to the rise of social media and ease of selling direct-to-consumer (plus, celebrities seeing other celebrities succeeding in this area). 

All these lines have a similar end goal—to lucratively expand a celebrity’s brand portfolio and name recognition—but Kardashian’s approach is slightly different than the route carved out by Barrymore, Clarkson, and Witherspoon, all of whom aggressively market themselves as relatable to the average white female suburbanite. The SKKN BY KIM home collection, among a larger new outcropping of celebrity homeware brands introduced during (or just before) the pandemic-induced "stay home" era, is instead following in Mother Goop’s footsteps. Stars are not just like us, these products say. But buy what they’re selling and you might at least be able to live a little more like them. 

The range of celebrities entering the home decor and accessories game is remarkable, largely because it demonstrates the universal appeal of aspiration-driven interior design. 

Consider Seth Rogen’s Houseplant, which launched in 2019 to sell cannabis accessories, then expanded to include home goods earlier this year. The retail site offers not only original pottery by the famed actor, writer, and stoner, but also ashtrays, lighters, and other aesthetically appealing weed accouterments. The draw isn’t the price point; walk into any old head shop and you can buy paraphernalia for a fraction of the cost. It’s more that if Rogen likes this specific $225 carry case for his weed-smoking necessities, and if you like Rogen, then you might like the carry case for yours, too. And when someone compliments your limited-edition $285 Gloopy Ashtray by Seth, you get to say, "Thanks. Seth Rogen made it," which is more of a flex than saying you got the receptacle for ashes from Doctor Kush’s Chronic Castle and Ganja-porium. (Though all due respect to the smoke shops that keep our college campus economies thriving.)

The range of celebrities entering the home decor and accessories game is remarkable, largely because it demonstrates the universal appeal of aspiration-driven interior design. Earlier this year, Blink-182 drummer—and Kardashian’s now brother-in-law—Travis Barker collaborated with British hardware label Buster + Punch to design an edgy line of metal goods with skull-shaped cabinet knobs, candleholders, and a $245 skull-shaped door stop, the latter of which was advertised by high-end U.K. retailer Harrod’s as "a perfect way to bring a rock ‘n’ roll–influenced accent to your home." Kardashian’s ex-husband West also filed a trademark for a line of (yet unreleased) homeware products last year. 

Outside of the Kardashians-verse, singer-songwriter Lenny Kravitz launched an expectedly sensual CB2 collab (his second with the home furniture and decor brand) in late 2021, which includes a velvet rust-colored herringbone ottoman and an industrial steel credenza. (For a much cheaper way to make your home feel like Kravitz’s, consider overflowing your toilet and flooding your neighbor’s apartment.) Then, there’s Courteney Cox, most famous for playing the cleanliness-crazed Monica Geller on Friends, whose new brand of household cleaning and organizing products, Homecourt, is trying to make "home-care" the new "self-care."

With social media providing what at least feels like a more authentic look into famous people’s lives, fans and followers can easily look to celebrities as the curators of how we live, most easily through the products we surround ourselves with. Few have seen that as clearly as Chrissy Teigen, who used her unfiltered Twitter presence (albeit, with some controversies) to grow her brand, Cravings, which sells kitchenware and spices, alongside cookbooks and kaftans. The model uses the "stars aren’t like you…unless you buy this thing" tension as a brilliant marketing strategy. With Safely, the line of "plant-powered" cleaning products Teigen launched with Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner in 2021 (before she stepped away due to the aforementioned drama), the campaign played on the tension that neither of these women likely clean their own houses, using photos of Teigen performing household tasks in an evening gown and Jenner adding soap to an already bubbly sink in a white power suit.

Whereas these types of household product launches were once seen as desperate money grabs by fading celebrities, they ultimately proved to be a great way to get rich. Take ’80s supermodel Kathy Ireland, who was worth an estimated $360 million as of 2016—not because of her many Sports Illustrated covers, but because of her licensing empire that extends to the Home Shopping Network and a line of office furniture.  

Now that A-list names are doing it, an entire world of branding and licensing opportunities have opened up to celebrities savvy enough—or with business managers savvy enough—to know that the closest way to a consumer’s heart is through their home. Homeware collaborations are popping up in the least likely places; early last year, basketball player James Harden came on as creative director for "smart home fragrance brand" Pura, releasing two diffuser scents imagined around his (ahem, former) jersey number, 13. In an even stranger brand collaboration, actor Eva Mendes joined sponge brand Skura Style as co-owner and brand ambassador in May 2022, with the site stating that "she finds doing the dishes oddly exciting." Hard for anyone without a dishwasher to relate to, but hey, invest in Mendes’s subscription sponges and you might find the excitement in dishwashing, too. 

The cost of these products fall across the board, depending—probably obviously—on the audience they’re courting. Somewhat disingenuously, Kardashian’s SKKN BY KIM line received criticisms for both the design and price point well before anyone got their hands on it. The New York Post, for example, headlined an article "Kim Kardashian wants to sell you a $129 concrete garbage can" and went on to quote an Instagram commenter who says the line was "giving me Zara Home, but [three] times it’s [sic] price."  

But it doesn’t really matter how overpriced or generic the pieces are, because what fans are buying isn’t just a trash can—it’s Kim Kardashian’s trash can. The purpose of the product is more than being a waste receptacle, but to bring Kardashian’s personal aesthetic into the most intimate place in your home. In a recent interview about her new homeware collection, Kardashian—ever the savvy business woman—seemed in on this. Asked about the most exciting part of creating the line, the mogul replied, "It’s been being able to take the calming aesthetic and monochromatic interior design elements from my home and bring it to others through these pieces." She then let something interesting slip: "I’m also so excited to share the Vanity Tray with everyone—it is the perfect, neutral base to display the SKKN BY KIM skincare collection, and together everything just looks so chic and gorgeous." 

The home goods line isn’t created to stand alone, but to exist synergistically within Kardashian’s brand umbrella. A Kardashian fan can now use Kim’s products to clean and make-up their faces; they can wear her SKIMS loungewear on their bodies, and watch her on The Kardashians while sitting in a home that, however vaguely, resembles the one she lives in. Like Rogen, Harden, or Barker, or any other celebrity in the home space, Kardashian is doing what she’s supposed to: Selling herself. 

Top photo courtesy of SKKN BY KIM Home Collection.

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