It dawned on sisters Olivia and Emily Davis, after more than a month of trying to convince themselves otherwise, that they had purchased, in Olivia’s words, “a terrible couch.”
The Davises bought the Anabei modular couch as the key piece of furniture in the living room of their Los Angeles apartment, replacing one they had acquired on Facebook Marketplace. The sisters mostly furnished the place with secondhand stuff, but they both kept getting online ads for the Anabei, which touted that the couch was machine washable, sustainable, modular and more.
“The pictures looked great. The design looked great,” Olivia says. “I just thought, ‘Oh, we are constantly looking into interior design stuff. We must be being fed this ad for that reason.’”
Their high hopes for the couch came crashing down after prolonged attempts at lounging on it. “In every direction that you would want to get comfortable, you are quite literally barred from doing so, because if you lean to your side, there’s a metal bar. If you lean back, there is a metal bar,” Olivia says. “It’s quite brutal.”
By the time the Davises felt certain that this was not the couch for them, the return window had closed. Now, they feel stuck with a $1,500 couch that doesn’t suit their relaxation needs. “This would be a great couch that would live in someone’s office where you’re not supposed to be getting too comfortable,” Olivia says. It would excel as “a place for you to sit and then leave very quickly.”
Replying to @devy couch tour!!!!! Anabei you will not see heaven!!!! #interiordesign #furniture #couchtok #couchreview #deinfluencing
Buying a couch has always been a high-stakes endeavor. It’s typically one of the largest pieces of furniture in a home, among the most expensive and one you will be living with for years. Modern economic forces have made the task trickier. Hungry for bigger profit margins, companies make furniture using cheaper materials and construction — meaning the final product simply isn’t built to last, even if the price tag implies otherwise.
And then there’s the internet. Today’s customers are operating under the subtle and overt influence of Instagram ads, TikTok Shop and actual influencers. The result: The rise of the viral couch, a piece of furniture that becomes inescapable online and may or may not be a piece of junk.
“Certain products flare up like sparklers and suddenly appear to be everywhere, creating instant demand,” says Frida Ramstedt, the author of “The Furniture Handbook,” over email. The “boneless” Cloud couch. The stupendous sectional. And as quickly as they rise online, often accompanied by that little “paid partnership” tag, they can tumble, pilloried in posts by remorseful customers. The Viral Couch is a new and powerful force, one that often leads to much older feeling: Couch Regret.
Ever since their TikTok about the couch went viral, the Davis sisters say they’ve gotten offers from popular furniture companies for collaborations. They’re trying not to be too tempted. “The last thing I would want to do is feed into the cycle of influencing people to buy couches that aren’t necessarily worth their money,” Olivia says.
The Anabei isn’t the first couch to rise in the ranks of 20-something esteem only to face a precipitous fall. Perhaps the first example of a vaunted sofa gone awry is West Elm’s Peggy, a boxy, mid-century model that reached a level of infamy after the Awl’s essay “Why does this one couch from West Elm suck so much?” in 2017. The author, Anna Hezel, initially felt proud of her purchase.
“West Elm felt like a really aspirational brand at the time, so it felt very sophisticated to me at that time in my life,” Hezel said. “Especially in a New York apartment, a sofa more than likely is going to take up like a quarter of whatever room you’re putting it in … so it felt like a really big aesthetic decision, a really big financial decision.”
But as she outlined in her piece, the couch began to fall apart shortly after the return window lapsed. At first, she castigated herself for screwing up this big purchase. Then, she learned that other owners of the Peggy similarly had issues: buttons popping off, a leg snapping and general lumpiness.
Hezel’s story has a happy ending. West Elm stopped selling the Peggy and ultimately decided to offer full refunds to the people who bought the $1,200 couch.
Some popular sofas are indeed low-quality duds. But more frequently, the trouble with a viral couch is sofa selection is deeply personal, Ramstedt says. (The Anabei and other viral couches have satisfied customers, too.) Individuals might find that what feels like sublime comfort to their favorite influencer is the wrong softness for their derriere or the wrong size for their living room.
Much like Hezel nearly a decade prior, the Davis sisters thought they were to blame for their couch woes. After reading in the instruction manual that “The pillow comes overstuffed, you can open the zipper and remove some of the filling to achieve the desired firmness,” Emily decided to take out some of the stuffing.
“I was like, oh this must be the key, this must be the answer. The reason why the throws are so firm is because it’s customizable,” Emily says. While she made a complete mess with all the discarded stuffing, “I was so proud of myself.” Then her sister came home.
“When Olivia got back, I was, like, ‘okay, isn’t it so much better?’ And she was like, ‘no, not at all,’” Emily says. In fact, it just deepened their dilemma. “It looked floppier and it has gotten worse in terms of comfort because now you are closer yet to the metal bar.”
Kendyl Skinner similarly faulted herself first for not finding the Anabei comfortable. “I kept getting the ads on Instagram and I was seeing them on TikTok and then when I would go and look up the reviews, they were all very good reviews,” she says. So, after assembling it, when she disliked the experience of sitting on her newly assembled couch, she initially thought she had done something wrong. “I was trying to force myself to like it in my head. I committed to it,” says Skinner, who lives in Columbus, Ohio.
First, she took off all the famously washable covers and washed them. When that didn’t help, she ordered a more premium, softer cover for the couch. “We get that on there and I sit on the couch and I’m like, ‘Okay, like this is better, but the couch is still so uncomfortable,’” Skinner says.
“Comfort is very subjective,” Anabei’s head of customer service, Susan Dalton, said over email. “We have 6 brands at various price points and comfort levels but recognize that given how subjective comfort is ultimately the best customer experience is to ensure we offer free shipping and free returns (no fine print) to allow a prospective shopper to try it for themselves and decide if Anabei is right for them. When purchasing a sofa that comes in a box, assembling it correctly is important to the overall experience. In many cases, through troubleshooting, we find comfort can be improved through proper assembly.”
Ramstedt, the furniture expert, agrees that “comfort is deeply personal. A sofa can feel too hard, too soft, too angular, or the fabric might feel rough. These are things you simply can’t evaluate from a photo, which sets people up for disappointment,” she says. She recommends trying out furniture in real life before purchasing.
She says you should ask yourself how you actually plan to use your sofa, which will help determine the best depth, firmness, back angle and other elements. “If you want to semi-recline while watching movies, you need a deeper seat. If you sit upright frequently, you may prefer a shorter depth, firmer cushion and a higher back,” Ramstedt says. “If the sofa will be used by kids or pets, durability and washable fabrics become essential. Your lifestyle should dictate your choice — not trends.”
Ramstedt also takes issue with the idea sold by the internet that you should be replacing your sofa at all. When interior influencers constantly switch out their couches for a new look, she says, “it creates a false sense that swapping out your sofa every year is normal or reasonable. It isn’t.” Use smaller details, like throw pillows or blankets, to reflect a trend you like, she says, because those are “far easier to swap out without significant environmental or financial impact.”
The Davis sisters can’t swap out their much-loathed couch right now, as much as they’d like to.
Part of it is a question of affordability. There’s also an emotional component. “It feels like even starting the conversation of which couch to replace this couch with felt like we were just going to be sort of in that fun house, merry-go-round, heinous carnival ride again, and we were going to be tricked again,” Olivia says. “And we were feeling too emotionally wrought to put ourselves through that.”
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