The baby wakes me up at 5am these days, so let’s talk about $RH. I’ve been following $RH for half a decade now, and I started off with a profound misunderstanding of the company. When $RH started its membership program back in 2016, I thought it was a stupid idea and 1/

a half-assed way to graft a Costco membership dynamic onto what was supposed to be a high-end furniture store. Very confusing. Of course, I was the one who was stupid because my girlfriend at the time (now wife) was an interior designer, and I didn’t bother to ask her about /2

it. $RH employs a bunch of interior designers to help you with your design needs, and you get access to them for the $100 membership fee + you get 25% off all full-priced items. What’s going on here? $100 to save hundreds of dollars + you get interior design services? You 3/

might think it’s $100 fee to have the interior designer upsell or sell more products, and it… sort of is? But what I didn’t know and hadn’t bothered to ask my gf/wife was how interior designers worked. It turns out that if you’re a licensed interior designer, you get 20-25% 4/

off high-end furniture for your clients anyway. And once she told me this everything clicked. The $100 rate was a way to aggregate clients for their internal RH interior design folks, and these interior designers were going to get a 25% discount on their purchases anyway, so 5/