The Global Nature of OurThings: A Web of Relations in Service of our Habits and Habitat
Introduction: The Paradox of the Personal and the Global
The home is perhaps the most personal space in our lives — a sanctuary of routines, memories, and meaning. Yet behind even the smallest domestic decision lies a vast and often invisible global network. The chair in your living room may have been designed in Italy, assembled in Vietnam, upholstered with leather from Argentina, and shipped through a port in Singapore before it reached you. The wall paint, the mattress, the fridge — each draws from distributed systems of production, regulation, logistics, marketing, and cultural translation. Domestic life, despite its intimacy, is increasingly orchestrated by forces that stretch across continents and time zones.
This paradox — that the deeply personal nature of home is continuously shaped by the global — sits at the heart of OurThings. If the Large World Model (LWM) for Domestic Life is to guide people through decisions about how they live, it cannot afford to think narrowly. It must be trained not just on one region, one style, or one culture, but on the complex, interwoven reality that defines how homes are shaped today.
This raises a core strategic question: Should a platform like OurThings begin with a strictly geographic focus? Should it enter a single regional market with defined logistics channels and known customer behaviors? Or should it launch with a global orientation — accepting from the outset the complexity of cross-border distribution, fragmented marketing environments, and variable consumer expectations? We argue that the latter is not only inevitable, but essential. The LWM for Domestic Life is inherently global for several key reasons:
Its Core Intelligence is Universal
The LWM is trained on a vast dataset encompassing a wide array of habits and habitats. The needs, patterns, and aspirations it reflects are not confined to one culture or geography — they are cross-cutting and cumulative, capturing the diversity of how people live around the world.Style Is Both Local and Universal
While taste is shaped by region, history, and identity, it is also a universally human mode of expression. A Moroccan riad and a Tokyo apartment may look nothing alike, yet both reflect a similar impulse: to shape space with meaning, coherence, and care. The LWM must account for both the individuality of style and its global prevalence.Manufacturing and Consumption Are Already Global
Furniture and home goods are made in diverse centers of production and shipped to equally dispersed centers of consumption. The same item might be sold in Los Angeles, Lagos, and Lisbon — sourced from entirely different routes but meeting the same human need.Material Sourcing Extends the Global Web
Even before manufacturing, raw materials travel complex routes — wood from Scandinavia, stone from India, textiles from Turkey — reinforcing the deeply international nature of every domestic object.All This Rides on Shared Infrastructure
Roads, ports, tunnels, cargo ships, railways, and warehouses — supported by the software and schedules that keep them operational — create a common, interlinked backbone for distribution. No home exists outside this infrastructure, and no intelligent model of the home can ignore it.The Energy Grid Is a Shared Constraint
As energy markets grow more interconnected and climate concerns rise, the cost and sustainability of shipping, production, and last-mile delivery become shared global challenges. What affects pricing in one region reverberates across others.Data at Global Scale Enables Industry Transformation
To truly defragment the home goods industry and support more efficient manufacturing and distribution, OurThings must capture global demand, usage, and behavior patterns. Only then can it inform supply-side decisions that reduce waste, cut costs, and serve people more effectively — across borders.Markets Are Already Overlapping
With direct-to-consumer brands selling internationally and shoppers browsing global catalogs, consumers are no longer confined to their region. To compete effectively, a platform must meet this expectation of access and choice from the start.
It is true that certain components of the domestic experience — particularly service providers — remain local. Insurance, moving, renovations, landscaping, and repairs are all rooted in place and bound by regulation. In this context, operational models, best practices, and platform infrastructure can be made consistent across markets, offering familiar workflows to providers and members alike. The task is to build a platform that respects and integrates geographic specificity while enabling broader connection. The global nature of OurThings reflects more than technical or logistical demands—it acknowledges the way people already live in a world that is connected, overlapping, and irreversibly plural. In what follows, we will take a closer look at the demand for a universal approach as well as the implications for how we might approach building and marketing OurThings.
Part I: A Global Sensitivity Empowering the Local
I. Its Core Intelligence is Universal
At the heart of OurThings is a model built for the full range of domestic life as it actually exists: layered, evolving, and globally diverse. The Large World Model (LWM) for Domestic Life draws from data sets that reflect countless ways of living — from urban apartments in Seoul to rural farmhouses in Andalusia, from multi-generational compounds in Nairobi to modular flats in Copenhagen. These variations reveal recurring patterns in human behavior — how people organize space, care for possessions, express identity, and adapt to constraints — that transcend cultural boundaries.
This universality doesn’t erase difference. It captures how the need for shelter, comfort, continuity, and change is shared across humanity, even as the form it takes varies dramatically. This diversity makes the physical place that someone is furnishing — the actual home — one of the most powerful filtering mechanisms for navigating the overwhelming range of things available. The LWM recognizes that every furnishing decision is a negotiation between fixed context and personal style, between a sense of place and a moment in time. That balance is what gives domestic life its emotional and aesthetic coherence, and what gives the model its relevance and precision.
This intelligence goes beyond recognizing patterns. It enables action by anticipating what someone is likely to need based on the type of home, the timing of the move, and the style preferences of the member. As a result, we can surface recommendations far earlier in the decision-making process. In doing so, it improves the member experience and has the potential to shift demand patterns across the industry. If buyers are nudged to make decisions even a few months earlier, those upstream signals can help alleviate global logistical bottlenecks, reduce lead times, and make use of existing inventory more efficiently. Over time, this kind of coordinated, anticipatory planning — made possible by the collective intelligence of the model — gives us the opportunity to reshape the entire domestic supply chain in favor of better outcomes for both consumers and producers.
II. Style Is Both Local and Universal
Every home reflects a basic set of shared needs: shelter, organization, comfort, and expression. These needs are universal. They define the purpose of domestic space across every society. Yet the way they are met — the materials used, the spatial conventions adopted, the cultural meanings assigned to objects — diverges radically depending on geography, history, and economy. A kitchen in Kyoto serves the same functional role as a kitchen in Cape Town, but the layout, tools, and rituals surrounding it may be entirely distinct. This is what makes style so complex: it is the result of global sameness and local difference, of common needs expressed through specific and sometimes contradictory contexts.
The LWM is designed to hold that tension. Rather than understanding style as a static catalog of trends, style is seen as a living expression of people adapting to their environment, their culture, and their moment in history. A Moroccan riad and a Tokyo apartment may look nothing alike, yet both reflect the same impulse — to shape space in a way that aligns with deeply held values and aspirations. The LWM observes these differences in order to support their diversity. It helps individuals navigate a world of options by identifying what resonates aesthetically, emotionally, and practically.
This contextual intelligence allows the platform to recommend objects and layouts that align with how people actually live — whether that means maximizing airflow in a tropical climate, working with modular construction in dense cities, or preserving inherited pieces in a multigenerational household. In doing so, it helps users both decorate a space and inhabit it more fully. It gives form to a style that is but built from the inside — drawing from the vast, hybridized archive of how people everywhere make homes their own.
III. Manufacturing and Consumption Are Already Global
No matter where a home is located, the objects within it almost certainly bear the imprint of global trade. A single sofa may be designed in Milan, upholstered in Vietnam, and sold in New York. The rug beneath it might be handwoven in Jaipur, the lamp beside it cast in Taiwan, and the coffee table sourced from reclaimed French oak. This complex choreography — of design, fabrication, shipping, and sale — is the default condition of today’s home goods economy. Manufacturing is distributed, consumption is dispersed, and style flows fluidly across regions.
This reality presents an opportunity for better coordination. Rather than pretending that domestic goods are local or self-contained, the LWM embraces their composite nature. It understands how products move through a supply chain shaped by lead times, tariffs, labor markets, and logistics hubs. This allows the system to make better recommendations based on taste and fit as well as on availability, timing, and sustainability.
At the same time, the global nature of consumption means that buyers are no longer restricted to what is offered in their immediate market. Direct-to-consumer brands, international shipping platforms, and the rise of online discovery have made it possible to furnish a home with pieces from nearly anywhere. This abundance also introduces friction — uncertainty around compatibility, shipping delays, mismatched expectations. The model reduces this friction, matching the global breadth of supply with the specific, lived context of demand. Beyond highlighting the beautiful and new, the platform shows what works for this home, at this moment, and under these constraints
IV. Material Sourcing Extends the Global Web
Even before an object becomes a product, it begins as raw material — and those materials, too, follow global paths. The wood used in a Scandinavian dining table might come from forests in Eastern Europe or North America. The stone in a bathroom sink may have been quarried in Brazil or Rajasthan. Textiles used for upholstery could originate from Turkish mills, Peruvian alpaca farms, or synthetic labs in China. Each item that ends up in a home carries a hidden map — of extraction, refinement, transit, and transformation — that links it to landscapes, workers, and ecosystems far beyond the domestic sphere.
The Large World Model accounts for this deeper layer of interconnectedness. Understanding the sourcing journey of materials allows the platform to better estimate timelines, flag environmental risks, and expose opportunities for reuse, substitution, or more efficient procurement. It also gives members new ways to engage with their choices. A chair is both a shape or a color as well as a product of multiple geographies, economies, and labor systems. These histories matter, particularly to consumers who want to make decisions aligned with values of sustainability, durability, or provenance.
At the same time, the more the LWM can see into the early stages of the supply chain, the more it can begin to align demand with capacity. Knowing where materials are sourced, how often they’re delayed, or where bottlenecks are likely to occur allows for smarter, earlier recommendations. It creates the conditions for a planning system that is personalized and predictive — adjusting to real-world conditions while preserving the individual vision of the home.
V. Shared Infrastructure Lies at the Core
Behind the global flow of home goods lies a vast, intricate infrastructure that includes roads, ports, tunnels, and rail lines as well as the digital scaffolding that governs how goods are tracked, procured, routed, and delivered. From enterprise resource planning systems and inventory software to procurement platforms and logistics tracking tools, the infrastructure of domestic goods is as much digital as it is physical. Yet access to this infrastructure varies wildly. Large manufacturers operate with advanced systems, global partners, and proprietary data, while smaller producers often rely on basic, low-cost tools — if any — to coordinate fulfillment.
The software market tends to follow a familiar structure: a few expensive, full-suite systems for major players, a growing middle tier of SaaS platforms for midsize firms, and lightweight or improvised solutions for small and emerging producers. This fragmentation limits coordination. There is little shared visibility across companies, no unified map of where things are, how they’re moving, or where delays are building. An LWM has the potential to bridge this divide. By serving as a high-level observer — a layer that sits above individual systems — it can begin to provide essential signals to all players, especially around timing, demand patterns, and project-specific requirements. It ties the logistics of the thing — its journey, its assembly, its delivery — back to the home it’s meant to serve, and the timing of life it’s meant to align with.
Shipping systems today are largely opaque and reactive. Companies choose carriers based on a shifting mix of price, speed, reliability, and reputation, but few smaller entities can afford the tools that optimize these decisions across regions or seasons. As a result, large firms operate with far greater efficiency — and at times, greater waste — while small ones struggle to compete. This asymmetry doesn’t have to persist. Larger manufacturers have a long-term interest in nurturing and collaborating with smaller studios and independents. These smaller firms often produce the most innovative, culturally attuned work — the very IP that large companies seek to acquire, license, or emulate to keep their collections fresh and relevant to emerging generations.
To make this system work better, we must invest in the middle layers: the hubs, staging points, and hybrid fulfillment nodes that allow the global to meet the local. Import and export hubs can be designed to accommodate the scale and complexity of high-end furniture logistics. They can also be designed to break down containers efficiently and move items closer to where people live. This creates opportunities for staging areas — spaces where goods are temporarily curated, sampled, and previewed. These staging zones could be located in urban peripheries or within residential communities themselves. Beyond logistics, they would offer a new kind of retail experience.
Brands can invest in populating these spaces to reach engaged buyers at key decision points, and OurThings can use community tools to make those investments mutually beneficial. The fees we streamline between members, makers, and service providers — from shipping and sourcing to resale and storage — can in part be reinvested into short-term financing or co-funded production runs. This model begins to soften the risk around unsold inventory while making it easier for goods to circulate through the system in more efficient, meaningful ways.
VI. The Energy Grid Is a Shared Constraint
Every object that enters a home carries an unseen but significant energy cost — in its material extraction, its manufacture, its transportation, and its storage. While these stages are distributed across borders, they are ultimately tied together by a common constraint: energy. And as global energy markets grow more interconnected — and more volatile — the cost and sustainability of domestic goods increasingly depend on our ability to coordinate within this constraint.
Rising fuel prices, supply shocks, and emissions regulations don’t just affect individual manufacturers — they ripple through the entire home goods ecosystem. They change shipping routes, delay production cycles, and raise the final cost of goods sold. As environmental mandates tighten and carbon accounting becomes standard practice, producers and logistics providers alike will be forced to make tougher tradeoffs between speed, cost, and sustainability. These are both challenges for corporations as well as for consumers who face fewer options, longer wait times, and higher prices.
An LWM offers a way to surface these hidden variables. By tracking both where and what of each object as well as how it was made, how it moves, how much energy it consumes across its lifecycle, the platform can help users make better-informed decisions. For some, that might mean choosing a closer, more sustainable alternative. For others, it might mean buying earlier to account for constrained routes. Over time, as the model accumulates data across geographies and product categories, it can begin to generate predictive signals: where shortages will occur, where costs are about to rise, where alternatives might be advisable.
But visibility alone isn’t enough. To make a real impact, the model must be used to shape collective behavior. If we can guide millions of people to make more energy-conscious purchases, earlier and more predictably, then manufacturers and logistics providers can plan with greater confidence. This reduces last-minute shipping, rush manufacturing, and underutilized routes — some of the most energy-intensive behaviors in the system. What emerges is a better consumer experience and a coordinated industry response to a shared global constraint.
VII. Data at Global Scale Enables Industry Transformation
To transform how things move, how they’re made, and how homes are furnished, the industry needs a new kind of intelligence — one that doesn’t just operate at the level of a single brand, retailer, or region, but across the entire ecosystem. Today, most manufacturers, designers, logistics providers, and platforms operate in data silos. They know what their customers bought, but not how those purchases relate to broader trends, local needs, or changing life circumstances. They can see what moved through their warehouse, but not what sat unpurchased due to mismatched timing, styling, or cost. As a result, billions of dollars are spent reacting to fragmented demand, rather than planning in alignment with this demand.
An LWM will change this. By connecting style profiles, home contexts, product behaviors, and service histories, it can generate a living, integrated picture of how people make decisions across markets. This enables something rare in the world of physical goods: demand forecasting that is personal, contextual, and accurate. For producers, this means less waste, better product development, and smarter inventory strategies. For retailers, it means earlier insights into what styles, finishes, or formats are gaining traction. More importantly, this data enables coordination between entities that have historically operated in isolation. If manufacturers can anticipate regional surges in demand, they can pre-position inventory. If storage providers can predict when and where goods will require temporary holding, they can optimize space and lower costs. If service providers can see what products are moving into their area, they can train staff, order tools, or plan routes accordingly.
This transformation only happens at scale. It requires participation — from large manufacturers and small artisans, from global shippers and local warehouses, from designers and delivery crews. The more data that flows through the model, the more accurate and actionable its outputs become. In this way, OurThings goes beyond being a planning tool for individuals. It becomes a backbone for the entire domestic ecosystem, offering the intelligence needed to reduce friction, align supply with demand, and reshape how goods circulate in the world — from the factory floor to the front door.
VIII. Markets Are Already Overlapping
In the world of home goods, the traditional idea of bounded, non-competing territories no longer holds. Consumers routinely browse, compare, and purchase items across borders. Designers post globally, brands ship internationally, and aesthetic trends emerge simultaneously in Copenhagen and Seoul, Mexico City and Melbourne. Style has escaped regional confines — and so have the systems of influence, aspiration, and demand that shape it. In response, OurThings begins with a global orientation rather than building the platform region by region. This approach is also essential in order to maintain structural coherence. A truly useful model must reflect the range of regions, styles, climates, incomes, and cultural expectations that shape the modern home. This requires onboarding a broad base of brands and designers from as many regions as possible.
This approach resolves the longstanding question of territory and platform scale. Instead of defending borders or waiting for sequential rollouts, OurThings builds a foundation that is interoperable from day one. This brings enormous benefits to all participants. Greater visibility across markets can rebalance the relationship between price and value — illuminating the costs of low-wage labor and unsustainable sourcing while supporting producers who operate responsibly.
A global network also introduces a new form of accountability. When markets see one another — when regional conditions, constraints, and contributions are made visible — there is more room for coordination and less tolerance for exploitation. Transparent systems make it easier for good actors to thrive and for the ecosystem as a whole to respond to emerging needs. At the same time, regional style remains a key differentiator. People will always want to buy from designers and makers who reflect their place, their heritage, or their emerging cultural moment. The model uses these distinctions to sort and recommend — ensuring that global access does not erase local identity. In doing so, it offers the best of both worlds: an open, coordinated platform that respects the uniqueness of a region while enabling the efficiency and insight of scale.
Part II: The Implications of This Global Nature
I. End-to-End Asset Management
In a world where domestic goods move across continents, change hands multiple times, and are made from materials sourced from dozens of countries, visibility is power. OurThings aims to introduce a new standard: end-to-end asset management for the domestic environment. This means tracking the complete lifecycle of every object — from its material origins, through its design and manufacture, to its sale, use, resale, maintenance, and eventual recycling or reuse. This level of traceability creates not only better outcomes for individual members, but a reference model for the entire industry.
Each piece of furniture, appliance, or decor item becomes more than a product — it becomes a documented asset. The platform knows how it was made, where it came from, who owned it, what it was paired with, when it was serviced, and when it’s ready for a new life. This enables more accurate recommendations, better valuation for resale, easier repair, and clearer guidance for recycling. It also becomes the basis for smarter design decisions at the manufacturing level: designers and producers can begin to learn from real-world usage data, extending the longevity and versatility of their goods.
As OurThings expands into adjacent spaces — from real estate and renovation to insurance, storage, and resale — the value of this asset management framework compounds. These industries have long lacked a shared model for understanding the full arc of a thing’s life. Now they can participate in a system where data is continuous, ownership is traceable, and value can be preserved, protected, and even grown over time. What begins as an infrastructure for visibility ultimately becomes a mechanism for generating a return — financial, material, and environmental.
II. The Loss of Cultural Continuity
As global systems of production and consumption grow more dominant, a subtler loss is unfolding — the erosion of cultural continuity in the domestic sphere. Vernacular traditions, inherited design languages, regionally specific materials, and place-based knowledge are increasingly displaced by mass-produced, globally distributed goods. The logic of convenience, scale, and cost-efficiency often overrides the nuance of local heritage, leading to homes that may be stylish and functional, but are increasingly detached from the histories and ecologies that once shaped them.
If we lose this cultural continuity, we risk losing the capacity to transmit craft, meaning, and relationships between people and place. When a handmade chair pattern passed down through generations is replaced by a generic import, we lose a design as well as a way of understanding proportion, material, climate, and care. We lose a lineage of domestic intelligence. In this context, we are not seeking to reverse globalization, but to reframe it as something that can be made accountable to the specific and the situated. The platform has the potential to surface overlooked traditions, empower regional producers, and help users discover both what is valuable globally as well as what is meaningful locally. With the right metadata and visibility, it can gain new relevance, becoming part of a shared, living archive of how people shape home.
III. A Global Model That Respects Local Knowledge
The promise of a global platform often comes at the cost of specificity. Systems are standardized for scale, interfaces are simplified for broad usability, and local practices are too often treated as edge cases. OurThings takes the opposite approach. It is a global model precisely because it is designed to respect, accommodate, and learn from local knowledge. The system gains its intelligence through variation. The more diverse the inputs — in geography, material use, design conventions, spatial constraints, and cultural preferences — the more precise and personalized its outputs can become.
This begins with recognition. The LWM is built to recognize regional distinctions as both aesthetic choices as well as embedded forms of intelligence — insights into climate adaptation, material durability, household composition, resource availability, and cultural ritual. A tiled courtyard in Cairo, a sunken hearth in Sapporo, a screened porch in Charleston — each reflects both taste and knowledge. By integrating these into its data model, OurThings treats local practices as valuable contributors to a shared, federated system of understanding domestic life.
The platform also allows for localized planning, procurement, and services. It enables users to design and furnish their homes in a way that feels coherent with their immediate environment while still engaging with a broader ecosystem of goods, ideas, and possibilities. It supports retailers and service providers in maintaining regional specificity while plugging into a global infrastructure that reduces friction and expands reach. This is what makes OurThings uniquely positioned: it offers a common framework for personalization and localization to operate side by side.It promises a system that adapts everywhere — one that is intelligent enough to know when global efficiency should be applied, and when the wisdom of the local should lead.
IV. Rendering the Complexity of Things
At the heart of OurThings lies the capacity to render — visually, spatially, and semantically — the full complexity of the world of things. What has long appeared as a fragmented and ungraspable market becomes, through the Large World Model, a coherent surface of possibility: a living, dimensional archive of global production, personal aspiration, and communal taste. Imagine a single view: a grid containing one chair from every brand we’ve indexed as high-fidelity, richly annotated image pulled directly from trusted sources. Each object carries with it metadata on material origin, design lineage, sustainability, provenance, and even projected future ownership. Beyond a catalog, they are a portrait of the world’s domestic space at a particular moment in time — a snapshot of what the community values, owns, desires, and circulates.
This collective rendering can take many forms. It may wrap the interior surfaces of an OurThings office, animate the walls of a showroom, or appear as a limited-edition publication co-owned by participating brands. It may live as an evolving visual index accessible through our CMS, or serve as a generative feed that fuels design inspiration, inventory planning, and editorial curation. However it’s encountered, the point remains: our ability to show the whole is what makes personal meaning and discovery possible. By making visible the full scale of the ecosystem — and situating each member and object within it — we unlock a new kind of relevance, one that connects the dreams of individuals to the infrastructure of the world.
V. Participation and Stewardship at Global Scale
To build a system as vast and interconnected as the one OurThings envisions, participation cannot be passive. It must be reciprocal. Beyond being a tool for discovery or planning, we are building a shared infrastructure that grows stronger with every contributor, every object mapped, every place understood. With this shared system comes an opportunity to cultivate a global culture of stewardship around the domestic world. Historically, such stewardship has been local — the responsibility of individual homeowners, craftspeople, or communities preserving what they could. In an era where goods, ideas, and people move globally, care must also scale. We make this possible by allowing individuals and institutions alike to contribute to a living model — one that reflects what people own, how they care for it, why it matters, and how it connects to others. It enables designers to trace the afterlife of their work. It allows members to understand the impact of their choices. And it offers policymakers, researchers, and producers insight into how homes are evolving in real time.
This visibility fosters inspiration across design traditions. A community storage solution in Helsinki might inform a sustainable housing project in Johannesburg. A new material innovation in São Paulo might be adopted by furniture makers in Toronto. A neighborhood staging hub in Seoul might become a model for urban logistics in London. These moments become part of a larger pattern: of people learning from one another through a shared, open-ended system that treats the home as a living, global site of meaning and experimentation. Together, they contribute to individual stewardship manifested in how one person decides to keep, repair, share, or pass down what they own. We hope to support this agency by giving each member a clearer picture of their space, their things, and their role within a broader fabric. That clarity creates a sense of responsibility and a structure through which better decisions become easier to make.
VI. Conclusion: A New Form of Belonging
Beyond a system for global logistics, we hope to build a framework for global meaning — a way for people to feel both rooted and connected, to live fully in their particular place while participating in a broader, shared cultural and material world. Our platform recognizes that the objects in our homes are symbols of care, continuity, and aspiration. They tie us to the people who made them, the places they came from, and the futures we imagine with them.
In this sense, the Large World Model for Domestic Life is not merely a recommendation engine or a backend for procurement. It is a living model of how people live — how they adapt and express themselves, how they carry traditions forward or shape new ones, how they invest in their space and steward their things. It both optimizes decisions and contextualizes them. It accelerates transactions and reorients them around meaning, timing, and care.
Belonging in the 21st century is no longer defined solely by proximity. We belong to networks of influence, supply, language, narrative, tribal allegiance, form of media engagement, memory, and design. OurThings weaves those threads into a structure that can be felt — a platform that brings coherence to the distributed world we inhabit. And in doing so, it offers a new kind of infrastructure: one that supports the intimacy of domestic life with the intelligence and reach of a global system. In this new form of belonging, people are not passive recipients of goods, styles, or systems. They are participants — shaping and being shaped by what they bring into their homes and what they pass along. And this, ultimately, is the promise of OurThings: to make that participation visible, intentional, and shared.
