What We Learned at The Inspired Home Show 2026
Every March, Chicago becomes the center of the home and housewares universe. The Inspired Home Show is North America’s largest housewares trade show. It draws retail buyers and industry professionals from more than 120 countries to McCormick Place. They come to discover new products, meet with suppliers, find new partnership opportunities, and take the pulse of where the home & housewares consumer insights and category is headed.
This year, Curion’s Client Relationship Directors Anna Badowski and Kristin Stine walked the floor, sat in on sessions, and talked with clients and colleagues. They went to listen, and here’s what the industry is saying.
The home & housewares market is sending mixed signals and rewarding the focused brands.
The first thing that became clear to us from the Circana keynote, presented by VP and Home Industry Advisor Joe Derochowski, is that the home industry isn’t struggling uniformly. Some categories are growing and others are sliding. But the difference matters if you’re deciding where to put your development dollars.
Home Décor is up 7%. Home Improvement and Textiles are each up 5%. Kitchen Electrics grew 3.1%, reaching $10.4 billion in total sales, driven by specialty appliances, coffee and espresso makers, and cookers.
However, Housewares overall declined 3.6% to $15.7 billion. And another shocker: New product introductions in small appliances fell: Kitchen Electrics down 21%, Housewares down 23%. But the silver lining inside those declining categories, a combined $60M gains came from bakeware, food storage, and grate/peel/clean products.
Circana identified six growth drivers for home in 2025: Replacement, Eating at Home, Moments of Joy, Health & Wellness, Weather, and Innovation. Eating at Home stood out as the most significant opportunity, and it connected to almost everything else we heard at the show.
Home & housewares consumers are cooking at home. Meet them there.
Eating out now costs three to four times more than cooking at home. That gap is the #1 reason consumers are cooking more, and 37% of Americans ate out less in 2025. But they haven’t lowered their expectations. They want restaurant-quality results at home. Premium ingredients, better tools, and the confidence to pull it off.
We think this shift is creating real product opportunity. Consumers are baking again (icing spatula sales are up 27%, pie and cake up 32%, metal loaf pans up 7%). Sides, appetizers, and beverages are becoming more present at main meals, a trend that’s been building since 2020. That translates to demand for entertaining gadgets, better beverageware, and serving tools, which are all seeing stronger purchase intent.
GLP-1: Understand It, but don’t build your home & housewares strategy around it without the right insights.
GLP-1 came up in nearly every session. We learned that roughly 10% of the population is on GLP-1 at any given time, with about 50% discontinuing within a year. That means it’s a rotating segment and it’s worth understanding, but it’s best to get product and consumer insights before anchoring a long-term product strategy for this particular category.
What the data showed us in sessions is how active GLP-1 users are shopping. They over-index heavily on Electric Grills and Griddles, Electric Skillets and Woks, Blending and Processing, and Vacuum Sealers. On the housewares side, Entertaining Gadgets lead, followed by Home Utility Cleaning Tools, Utensil Organization, and Beverageware.
The pattern is learned here is that GLP-1 users are hosting more at home and investing in the tools to support those occasions.
If your product supports that occasion, there’s a real audience need to pursue. If you’re designing specifically for GLP-1 users as a defined consumer, we urge you to stress-test that assumption before you build around it.
Global flavors and spices are reshaping the demand for kitchenware.
The session on global food and flavor trends, led by Leigh Ann Schwarzkopf of Project Partners Network, added another layer to the at-home eating scene. Consumers are cooking bolder. Global cuisines, spicier profiles, and ingredients that require different tools are gaining traction.
And herein lies the downstream opportunities for kitchenware. The tools needed to prepare, serve, and entertain around these foods is different from what’s already on most shelves – not the standard American pantry staples. Brands have an opportunity to fill in whitespace gaps and connect product development to modern-day eating occasions, not where they were five years ago.
Parents are busy. Ease and maintenance are now the new standard.
One of the more practical insights we learned from the sessions is simple: for households with kids, prep time and cleanup are critical factors, so busy parents are asking for products that make the whole process faster and easier from start to finish.
The data from the Springboard/Project Partners Network session showed desire for minimal care and maintenance is up 17% overall, and ease of use remains one of the top features influencing purchase decisions at 49%.
Know your home & housewares buyer. Know what leads their purchase decisions.
The generational data presented across multiple sessions gave a clear picture of the spending landscape in home and housewares. We gathered tons of great information, but here’s the short version.
Millennials and Gen X together account for about 60–70% of total home and housewares dollars, making them the core revenue engine. Boomers are high-value, selective purchasers. Gen Z is the future growth story, and also a real-time influence on what gets noticed.
Every generation is asking for quality, but they’re defining it differently. That’s the work brands need to discover and pinpoint.
Across all the consumer data we gathered at the show, we kept seeing a clear purchase decision picture. Consumers want products that work, that they can trust, that are priced fairly, and that have been validated by other people’s experiences.
Quality leads at 64%. Trust and Pricing/Promotion both come in at 49%. Ratings and Reviews at 47%. Design, Features and Benefits at 38%. Convenience at 37%.
And going on brand name alone only came to 32%.
Trust itself was unpacked in one session in a way we felt it was worth carrying forward. Product and brand trust is broken down into four components: reliability, credibility, intimacy, and self-orientation. The point being that trust goes beyond what a product claims it can do. People care about how a brand shows up across all of those dimensions over time.
And that’s what consumers are really buying.
The bigger picture around the home & housewares market
Walking the show floor, the honest observation from Anna and Kristin was that the innovation pipeline has slowed. There was plenty to see, but mostly iteration rather than transformation.
And with many industry tradeshows, we also saw many brands use the floor to gauge retailer interest before committing to full product development. Not a bad strategy, but don’t lose sight of testing your products with your true end consumer.
Brands leaders (the ones looking for that retailer interest) need to get close to real people and understand how they use products, what frustrates them, what delights them, and what would genuinely change their experience at home.
Brands have to validate their direction before they scale their product production. And – we can’t stress this enough – trust and follow the insight for what your target consumer recommends. That’s the real work. And it starts with knowing — really knowing — how your product performs in the hands of the people you’re building it for.