For Aubrey Gavello and Alex Wood, a trip to HomeGoods is like a treasure hunt.
The San Francisco couple recently took part in a TikTok trend where shoppers show off the quirky items they find at their local HomeGoods stores. The trend highlights home decor and furnishings that are sometimes bizarre, but seemingly unique to the store.
“You feel the need to run with it because the next day it’s gone,” Gavello, 27, said of the appeal of HomeGoods products.
Gavello and Wood found a lanky horse statue, a bust of a woman with bubbles on her head, a Santa mannequin wearing a pine needle skirt and more. Their TikTok is one of many videos about the home decor chain that has been viewed millions of times.
“You don’t really go in there because you need something,” Wood, 31, said. ‘You have a general idea, maybe of a Christmas decoration or maybe a piece of furniture or something. But HomeGoods really dictates for you, it tells you what to buy.”
Wood said he went to HomeGoods with his mother and pulled out the strangest items from the store to inspect. He said viewing and admiring the crazy inventory at HomeGoods feels like a universal experience.
The official HomeGoods TikTok account commented on the couple’s video, saying, “Sometimes you don’t know what you need until you go to HomeGoods.”
A HomeGoods spokesperson said, “There’s nothing more fun than seeing our Finders get excited about the discoveries they make in our HomeGoods stores.”
“As our stores receive new merchandise several times a week, our rapidly changing assortment of branded and designer merchandise provides our customers with the ‘scavenger hunt’ shopping experience they know and love,” the spokesperson said in an email.
The chain, owned by TJX Companies, is a sister company of TJ Maxx, Sierra Trading Post and Marshalls. The company “nearly doubled its annual revenue over the past decade to $54.2 billion in fiscal 2024,” according to CNBC. “Part of that success is due to changing the way it markets its stores,” CNBC reported.
The great thing about HomeGoods, according to Gavello, is that each location seems to have a “brand new set of things” for shoppers to find, even if the stores are close together. She said she and Wood went to another HomeGoods nearby to shoot another video and the aisles were otherwise filled.
Across the country, Tatyiana Gordon, 26, documented her own HomeGoods experience in Syracuse, New York. Gordon similarly said she believes the fun of a HomeGoods trip lies in the fact that no two stores are the same.
At one of the HomeGoods in her neighborhood, Gordon and her partner found a bust of a boxer wearing gold gloves, a squirrel lamp and a disco ball wearing a pink Santa hat. She said some products were difficult to describe, which posed a challenge in her video.
Gordon said the TikTok trend is fun because it shows the wide range of decorations that exist in HomeGoods stores.
Shopping at the chain can often feel like a unique experience because shoppers are likely “not going to be able to find it anymore,” she said. While some products may be absurd, she described them as “conversation starters.”
“I’m sure there are so many crazy things in our stores that we haven’t even found just because there are so many things being sold,” she said. “It’s just that store where you get everything you didn’t even know you wanted.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
