Why ‘boneless’ couches went viral, and how brands are capitalizing on the trend

Unboxing videos are popular for tech gadgets, cosmetics, and toys, but recently they’ve caught on for the most unlikely of products: couches.

“Boneless couches,” as they’ve come to be known on social media, have no internal wooden frames. Instead, like their mattress-in-a-box predecessors, they are constructed entirely of foam, then compressed and vacuum-packed in deceptively small boxes. When opened—as millions of TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube users have witnessed—they expand dramatically to assume their sofa forms.

Google searches for “boneless couches” and related terms were virtually non-existent before this year but, per Google Trends, are in full-throttle now:

• Searches for “boneless couch,” “boneless sofa,” “couch in a box,” and “boneless chaise lounge” all peaked in November.

The #bonelesscouch hashtag had been used on 13,200 TikTok videos, including one from @shellysharesdeals with more than 10.9 million views and another from @remi.and.the.beans with more than 10.1 million views.

While there are elements of luck and serendipity in viral trends, some furniture brands have been instrumental in starting and fueling this one.

Home sweet foam: Gabriel Dias is the co-founder and CEO of Rove Lab, a Vancouver-based couch-in-a-box startup which launched in September 2024 as a sister brand of furniture and decor brand Rove Concepts.

Dias told Retail Brew that furniture brands typically “are deeply on Google” for their marketing rather than on social media because “it’s a high-ticket product” with a “longer decision funnel” as opposed to an impulse purchase. However, when he first saw prototypes for the couch-in-a-box his brand would launch with, he decided social media was exactly where the brand would find its customers.

“When I saw the product the first time, I felt this is actually fairly social-friendly, based on what you see,” Dias said, referring specifically to the product being unboxed and decompressed. “You see the expansion.”

After it launched with a single couch 14 months ago in the US, UK, and Canada, it was not just the couches, but the business itself that expanded dramatically.

“We grew quite a bit more than expected,” he said. “The first four months, we did about $5 million and we didn’t expect that,” adding that the brand is selling “multiple X’s” of that figure now but declined to be more specific.

The brand, which sells about 90% of its products DTC and the rest on Amazon, is projecting it will sell about 20,000 units this year. After launching with one model, it now has four models and will soon introduce a fifth. Its Instagram follower count has swelled to 713,000.

The bulk of Rove Lab’s customers are aged 25–45, and Dias said it’s “over-indexing in places that are urban” where schlepping a couch up stairs and around corners and through doorways is an ordeal. One of its biggest markets is New York City, with New York state accounting for about four times as many sales as other states on average, he said.

Unlike typical couches, boneless couches—including Rove Lab’s—can be shipped with parcel shippers like UPS and FedEx.

“You don’t need to schedule an appointment,” Dias said. “There is a whole convenience aspect that…we leverage quite a bit.”

But it’s not just the last mile where boneless couches are—literally and figuratively—shaping up to be game changers for the furniture industry. It’s a radical change for the first mile, too.

Ship got real: Even before tariffs, the furniture industry was already facing a challenge, namely price hikes for shipping furniture from Asia.

“A couple years ago, ocean freight, which is our primary means of getting product from Asia, went up 10x for about a period of 10 months or so,” Ana Arun, CEO of California-based Lifestyle Solutions, which manufactures furniture under several brands, told Retail Brew.

For her company, that meant costs spiked from $2,500 to $20,000 to ship a container of furniture.

“So we started putting our thinking hats on, and the compressed sofas became really particularly attractive,” Arun said. “Because where you can normally ship 20–30 pieces in a container of a regular sofa, you could possibly fit 60 or 80 of these.”

Her company is developing what she called—in industry parlance less whimsical than “boneless”—“compressed-pack” couches, to be introduced in the first quarter of 2026.

She expects the products will resonate most with Gen Z and millennial consumers.

“They want things that are easy to move, easy to ship, easy to assemble,” Arun said. “Nobody has patience anymore.”