n across Asia, and a customer base that discovered the brand on a screen but, as Declan Ee readily acknowledges, still wants to sit on the sofa before buying it. Ee, co-founder and president of Castlery, spoke with Inside Retail from the midst of that build-out, against a backdrop of rising US tariffs, shifting sourcing strategies, and ambitious plans to plant flags in London, Melbourne and beyond.  Inside Retail: The US has become your largest market since 2019. What specific demand gave you confidence that now is the right moment to invest in a physical flagship in New York?  Declan Ee: We have been in the US for six years and have seen strong and consistent growth since launch, with the US now contributing to about 70 per cent of our global revenue. Within the US, New York has been our strongest market.  When it came to a physical showroom in the US, the question for us was never if, but when. We spent close to two years looking for the right space in New York City because we didn’t want a store for the sake of opening a store. Our goal was always to deliver the full Castlery experience, and a physical presence is the final piece of that. It completes what we have been building for our customers in the US for the past six years.  Online engagement drives discovery and access for our consumers, but furniture is still a tactile category. People want to sit, touch, feel and understand how a piece lives in their space. A physical presence does something that online retail cannot fully replicate: it builds brand awareness, deepens credibility, and shortens the decision cycle for customers who may have discovered us online but not yet committed to a purchase.  Based on what we have seen in other markets when we moved from online-only to a physical presence, we anticipate that the introduction of the physical space will drive a 30–40 per cent uplift in total sales in the New York market. That is the halo effect we have come to expect when we put down a genuine retail presence somewhere we already have strong online roots.  IR: What lessons from Singapore and Sydney directly informed the New York format, and what have you deliberately done differently for the US market?  DE: The biggest lesson for us was that consumer behaviour doesn’t scale the same way across markets. We learned this early on in Australia. Coming from Singapore, where everything is relatively compact, we initially thought people would travel across the city for furniture. In larger markets, that’s just not how people behave, and we ended up shutting our original Sydney store before recalibrating. We now have showrooms in Sydney and Brisbane.  Taking this into consideration, for the New York City showroom, we were very deliberate. We looked at over 200 listings across Manhattan before we landed on a location in the Chelsea neighbourhood. Chelsea is home to some of the most recognised furniture brands in the world, and being in that neighbourhood puts us exactly where our customers already are, both as residents and as design-conscious professionals. We have sized the showroom at 3000 square feet with 17 room sets that demonstrate how furniture works specifically in city living spaces, noting that consumer behaviour across US cities vary dramatically. For example, a customer in New York City lives very differently from someone in Los Angeles or Austin.  Unlike in Singapore, where most residents own their homes and plan purchases over a longer horizon, a significant proportion of US customers are renters. The US customer expects speed: they sign a lease and need furniture within a month. That shifted our delivery strategy so that fulfilment is part of the product experience, not just a support function. It is why we set up six distribution centres across the country before we ever opened a store.  IR: With rising trade tensions, does expanding in the US feel riskier? Did geopolitical factors affect your expansion plan in the US?  DE: There’s always an element of risk when you commit to a market at this scale, but we make decisions with a long-term view. The US is our largest market, and we believe in its fundamentals.  The tariff environment has validated what we have been doing all along. Diversifying our supply chain has always been a strategic priority, and today our production is spread across multiple manufacturing bases in Asia, including Vietnam, China, Thailand and India. This has been an ongoing and deliberate effort to reduce over-reliance on any single manufacturing market, so when the tariffs hit in April 2025, we were in a far better position than we would have been had we not already been on that path.  We currently have six warehouse distribution centres across the US, which help reduce delivery times, lower last-mile costs, and give us more control over the customer experience. Alongside that, a physical retail presence in New York City strengthens our brand on the ground in our most important market. You cannot control the external environment, but you can build a business that is resilient enough to grow through it.  IR: Are you exploring nearshoring or multi-country sourcing to mitigate tariff and logistics risks?  DE: We are constantly seeking out the best-in-class manufacturers and suppliers to work with across the world, and that naturally leads to a diversified, multi-country supply chain. Reducing over-reliance on any single manufacturing market has been a deliberate and ongoing priority, and our production today spans multiple bases across Asia. That work has mitigated our exposure to any single country’s tariff regime.  As part of that ongoing effort, we are also moving towards producing certain items in our bedding category in the US, which would further strengthen our supply chain resilience for those specific product lines.  Our national distribution network across the US complements this, giving us strong control over delivery speed, cost and the overall customer experience. IR: How will NYC results shape plans for more US stores amid trade shifts?  DE: New York City is a benchmark and a natural starting point for us. It’s where we test whether the model truly holds in one of the most competitive retail environments in the world, and we will let the data guide what comes next.  Our goal is to establish a physical presence for Castlery across cities that share a common consumer culture around design and urban living, and where we already have strong online traction. In the US, it naturally points naturally to cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington DC as next on our radar, though we will be deliberate about the pace. Each location needs to serve the customer well and represent the full Castlery experience.  That same logic drives our broader global ambition. We are targeting showrooms across the top 10 global English-speaking cities over the next three to four years, including markets like London and Melbourne, where we are actively exploring retail locations.  The current trade environment reinforces that discipline behind that approach. It pushes us to be more deliberate about where we invest, and to focus on locations where a strong customer base is already present. If we can make the model work in New York City, it gives us confidence that we can build a sustainable retail presence in other key cities as well. Further reading: Why Castlery’s Europe debut ‘feels personal’ and where the brand is headed next.