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Eden Project and Hypnos Win Sustainability Award | Home Living Newsletter

PLUS: Google Strategies for Growth

Author

Zihan Lyu
April 30, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

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Welcome to Home Living, your essential newsletter for decorating and furnishing eCommerce professionals.

Editor’s Pick 🌟

Marketing thought leadership has a tendency towards binaries. The funnel is either completely dead or very much alive. Brand marketing is either pointless or the solution to all your problems, and ChatGPT is ending 30 years of search overnight.

At Fospha, we love the measurement challenge of any new channel that offers our clients ways to reach more customers. However, Google is still very much the biggest advertising platform. Performance Max (PMAX) and Search products alone represent around 30% of our clients’ digital share of wallet.

In uncertain times, it’s more important than ever for brands to nail these core channels, so we produced the definitive best practice guide on PMAX and Paid Search. Here were our top findings:

  • ⚖️ Best performing brands allocate 55% of Google budget to PMAX and 12% to Paid Search.

  • 🏆 Brands that pair Search and PMAX with ~50% of their budgets in YouTube, Demand Gen and Paid Social see optimal results.

  • 🎨 Especially for PMAX, high-volume creative is key for AI-powered optimization.

Sector Spotlight 🎥

FURNITURE TRENDS

Demand for dark oak, walnut, and teak furniture is rising, driven by 1970s revival, biophilic design, and “quiet luxury,” offering marketers opportunities to reposition both vintage and contemporary pieces.

The appeal spans traditional and modern interiors, highlighting versatility and layering potential for differentiated campaigns. This trend underscores the value of warm wood finishes across product ranges, enabling targeted segmentation and cross-category marketing within the home décor sector.

SUSTAINABLE BRAND INNOVATION

The Eden Project’s collaboration with Hypnos Beds won the Sustainability Brand Licensed Product or Range Award for a mattress collection using responsibly sourced plant fibers and recyclable, chemical-free materials. This signals a growing consumer demand for tangible environmental responsibility in retail. Marketers can leverage such partnerships to align brand positioning with verified sustainability and transparent sourcing.

BRAND ACQUISITION

Dunelm’s acquisition of Designers Guild’s brand IP and archive, while licensing back operations, signals a calculated move to enhance its design portfolio without operational burdens. Marketers should note Dunelm’s focus on brand equity and digital growth, further evidenced by its 6.3% sales increase to $462m.

BRAND EXPERIENCE INNOVATION

Bolon's Exodus installation—conceived with Luca Nichetto and JoAnn Tan—transforms historically grounded textiles into immersive, surreal environments, signaling opportunities for marketers to use physical space and narrative design for stronger brand storytelling. Collaboration and creative freedom drive audience engagement and differentiate brand experiences in saturated markets.

Influencer Corner 📢

Meta Ads vs. Google Ads: Which One is Better for D2C Brands?

Meta ads excel at:
👉 Building brand awareness.
👉 Nurturing new customers with engaging content.
👉 Retargeting cold leads who didn’t convert initially.

Google ads are great for:
👉 Capturing demand when people are actively searching for solutions.
👉 Generating high-intent traffic with low CPC.
👉 Converting cold leads into paying customers quickly.

Which one should you focus on?
👉 Meta ads work best if you’re focusing on top-of-funnel and brand-building.
👉 Google ads work best when you’re ready to convert customers actively searching for your product.

Rumour has it that OpenAI might be quietly working on a native Shopify checkout inside ChatGPT.

Apparently ‘leaked’ code shows:

👉 'shopify_checkout_url'
👉 'buy_now'
👉 'product_offer_ratings'

No redirects. No search. Just chat, compare, and buy in one flow. Unconfirmed, but catching attention.

If this happens?

Google, TikTok, even product pages as we know them are all about to change.

Optimization Hub ⚙️

SEARCH INNOVATION

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) integrates traditional SEO with AI-focused strategies, ensuring content is both visible in classic search results and cited by AI models like ChatGPT or Perplexity. Marketers must structure content to answer specific questions, prioritize authority, and track AI-driven citations. Adapting to GEO is essential for maintaining discoverability in an AI-driven search landscape.

DISCOVERY COMMERCE INNOVATION

TikTok Shop’s newly released playbook, developed with Accenture Song, provides marketers and brands actionable frameworks for driving growth through discovery commerce, leveraging real-time creator content and robust measurement. With TikTok Shop rapidly capturing eCommerce market share, ignoring these trends risks falling behind competitors capitalizing on content-driven online retail.

INNOVATIVE PERSONALIZATION STRATEGIES

Cookieless personalization is reshaping digital marketing by requiring brands to use first-party and zero-party data, contextual targeting, and server-side solutions instead of third-party cookies, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA. This shift enables marketers to maintain effective, consent-driven customer engagement while safeguarding user privacy. Marketers must adapt quickly to sustain relevance and trust.

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