Insider #00004 - How Restoration Hardware got duped
Inside the Chinese furniture city reverse-engineering the entire RH catalog
🧵 MR. THREAD EXCLUSIVE
IN THE WINTER OF 2025, Chloe McGrath* flew from her home in New York to start a new life in Hong Kong with her husband. She soon found herself at the window of her new apartment, looking out at the twinkling skyline—thousands of towers, lit up at night, stacked with seven and a half million people on a strip of land wedged between the mountains and the sea. “It was an adventure moving to Asia,” she says. There was only one problem: their apartment was totally unfurnished. It was like living in an empty box.
“The furniture options in Hong Kong were really limited,” she says. There were designer Italian galleries priced for hedge-fund money, or IKEA and Zara Home. What she wanted was something more like Restoration Hardware. “The RH-style stuff that’s really popular, especially in America, it’s actually quite minimalistic,” she says. It was also expensive. What if they spent a fortune on sofas, and Hong Kong didn’t work out?
At first Chloe outsourced the problem. A woman in Hong Kong made her living sourcing furniture directly from Chinese factories on behalf of expat clients, and Chloe hired her. She ordered a few essential items, and they were affordable and well made. “But she has a little bit of a different style than us,” she says. And so she set out to do it herself.
On Reddit Chloe discovered a small, obsessive community that had figured out how to buy furniture directly from Chinese factories that copied famous American brands like RH and Arhaus. She started chatting with sellers on WeChat and WhatsApp. One was a sales representative who went by Rose, who handled international sales for a factory in Foshan called Zhenúr. Rose sent her a catalog. It ran to 148 pages.
The PDF was bilingual and organized like RH’s doorstep-sized catalog. There were chairs, coffee tables, side tables, dining tables, even outdoor furniture. The first thirty pages were sofas—long, low, modular designs in cream and ivory and dove gray, photographed in airy white rooms, just like RH. The prices were astonishing. “They’re able to make basically anything you would get from a Western retailer for a fraction of the cost,” Chloe says.