How Cozey is using AI to reconfigure furniture design

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When Cozey launched its Neptune sofa bed in 2024, the Montreal-based modular furniture company had spent nearly two years solving engineering challenges and getting all the components to work seamlessly so customers can easily assemble them at home. Now, with help from artificial intelligence tools and 3D printing, the company can take a new product from idea to prototype in a fraction of that time.

“If we did it again today with Claude, we could cut that down to nine months, a year,” says Frédéric Aubé, Cozey’s chief executive officer, who founded the company in 2020. “Just by having a thought partner to bounce ideas off and look at drawings to see [what’s] not working.”

Since introducing AI into its operations in January, Cozey has been using the technology to streamline design processes such as revising tech packs, the dense dimensional specifications the company sends to its manufacturers.

It previously took weeks and multiple designers to produce the tech packs, Mr. Aubé says. Now, a single designer loads the existing specs, constraints and notes into Claude and works through revisions in days. The company can generate renderings, share them among the design team and quickly refine a product.

For smaller components, such as accessories and connection points, the company’s Montreal Innovation Lab produces physical prototypes in-house using 3D printing, rather than waiting three to six weeks for a manufacturer’s sample. The effect, Mr. Aubé says, is that Cozey can now attempt harder designs than it could before. He points to Orian, a two-seater sofa that converts into a queen bed, released in May. The modular sofa bed breaks down into pieces for shipment to customers without surcharges and requires no tools for assembly.

“Difficult things are tough to copy,” Mr. Aubé says. “The easy stuff – everybody can do it, everybody can replicate it and it becomes a commodity.”

Tackling the last-mile delivery challenge

For Cozey, the ability to ship its products to customers in even the most rural areas of Canada is key to carving out market share in the Canadian home furniture market, which is estimated to reach around $18.2-billion by 2030, according to Mordor Intelligence.

The market is dominated by IKEA, Wayfair and legacy retailers such as Leon’s and The Brick, all of which have to navigate the challenges of last-mile delivery, transporting large and often cumbersome products from a local fulfillment centre to their customers’ doorstep.

“Last mile in Canada is not easy,” says Lyne Castonguay, an advisor and director at Cozey, who has also held executive roles at Sobeys and The Home Depot and served on Canadian Tire’s board. “If you build big and bulky stuff and you ship it, it’s very expensive, but if you can take it and make it smaller and ship it in boxes, it becomes less expensive – you can maintain your affordability.”

Designing for last-mile shipping has been a critical part of the business since the beginning. Mr. Aubé first came up with the idea for Cozey while analyzing public companies at a Montreal investment firm. He was in his fourth year at McGill University when he watched Sleep Country acquire mattress-in-a-box startup Endy for $89-million, and he started asking a simple question: What else could Sleep Country buy? Mr. Aubé began hunting for innovative startups trying to disrupt IKEA’s hold on the furniture-in-a-box model.

“People were doing it in the U.S., the U.K., in Australia and Europe, but nobody in Canada,” he says.

Mr. Aubé, whose father had bought a furniture manufacturing company when he was younger – giving him an early glimpse of the inner workings of the industry – saw an opportunity to create an easy-to-assemble sofa that fit in standard shipping boxes.

To Mr. Aubé, it made sense to start with a piece of furniture loathed by people trying to navigate tight stairwells and elevators while outfitting their condos and apartments.

Mr. Aubé decided to manufacture in China but had to delay his March, 2020 launch to June because of the pandemic.

“Sometimes I think, oh, I wish I would’ve launched a few years earlier because I would’ve gotten to really scale in the pandemic,” he says.

Expanding from couches to tables, seating and rugs

Canadian home furniture and furnishings online sales jumped 191 per cent between February and April 2020, while in-store furniture sales dropped 70 per cent over the same period, according to Statistics Canada. Cozey was just gaining traction, but small enough that it could easily pivot, when people stopped buying furniture to spend their money on travelling again in 2022, Mr. Aubé says. Today, Cozey has expanded from sofas into tables, storage, seating and rugs.

“All of our sofas are 100 per cent modular,” Mr. Aubé says.

The e-commerce team estimates its products can be reshaped into around 15,000 configurations.

Alongside a $10-million investment from La Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, the Quebec pension fund manager, the company has grown to around 300 employees.

Cozey has also expanded into brick-and-mortar, opening stores in Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary, and a pop-up in Los Angeles. It’s also launching operations in Australia and planning to open stores in Montreal, Edmonton and New York City by the end of this year. The U.S. now accounts for roughly 40 per cent of sales – surpassing $10-million in sales in its first six months and growing faster than in Canada.

Taking control of the supply chain

Cozey is not the only design-focused, direct-to-consumer Canadian furniture brand betting on physical retail. Vancouver-based Article, which launched in 2013, opened its first store in 2024 and is now expanding to Toronto and two U.S. cities.

David Ian Gray, a retail analyst and founder of Vancouver consultancy DIG360, says for companies such as Cozey, the ability to design its own products and control the full chain from concept to customer is what separates it from legacy retailers.

“The only thing that’s really dying is the notion of mass market multi-brand reselling,” Mr. Gray says.

He contrasts large department stores such as Hudson’s Bay with brands such as Simons or Lululemon, which focus on selling their own products.

“A lot of DTC [direct-to-consumer brands] have that inherently part of the model,” Mr. Gray says.

There are also many advantages to being responsive to customer needs.

Cozey’s approach to modular products and AI-powered ability to quickly prototype and get new products to market gives it marketability.

“By being clever [with the] sofa bed, that lends itself to being discovered by influencers who like to point out: ‘Hey, look at this neat thing’ as opposed to here’s just another sofa,” Mr. Gray says.

For Mr. Aubé, the ability to move faster from idea to prototype is less about keeping pace with competitors than about building the kind of company he has in mind for the long term. He is 29, he notes, and has no plans to sell.

With the infrastructure now in place, an innovation lab at Cozey’s headquarters, AI tools to increase efficiency and fulfillment centres across three countries, he sees the design process itself as the company’s most durable advantage.

“We have no goals like, okay, we will release four sofas this year,” he says. “I’m not a merchandiser … I want to develop great products for people.”