Target's Room Essentials

Room Essentials is Target’s $2B line of Modernist home furnishings. It had over 1,700 SKUs spanning multiple categories. But sales were moving in the wrong direction: seven consecutive quarters of decline. Target asked COLLINS to help them turn around the enterprise-sized product line.

Our brand platform, “Easy Modern,” emerged from an insight into Millennials’ decorating journey: they struggle to recreate “that look.” Their journey begins on Pinterest. Upon falling in love with a look, they venture to several stores in an attempt to bring it to life. Almost always, the attempt is in vain. “Difficult,” “time-consuming,” and “expensive” is how they described the experience. We knew Room Essentials could make it easier.

Inspired by California Modernism—an aesthetic deeply authentic to Target—we reimagined the line so items could be easily mixed and matched to attain a clean, modern look popular on Pinterest. Room Essentials became one of the first private labels to fully embrace Target’s overarching California Modernism ethos, aligning the retailer’s brand and its private-label portfolio under a shared design philosophy.

Leveraging this insight, we treated product photography not just as packaging imagery, but as shoppable inspiration. We designed it to feel authentic to Pinterest while standing out on the shelf. That way, Millennials could see something online, walk into a store, and find that exact image in front of them. In short, we recreated Pinterest in the real world and created a seamless content experience.

From there, we redesigned the brand, established a new packaging system, and trained Target’s internal teams to deploy it effectively as the line expanded.

When it hit shelves, our overhaul was an instant hit. It drove quarter-over-quarter swing—from negative to positive sales—in its first quarter. Ten years later, our reimagination of Room Essentials remains unchanged and continues to drive sales and absorb new SKUs and packaging formats.