The smoke of 618 has not yet cleared, and JD.com has quietly thrown out a heavyweight trump card.
Recently, JD.com quietly launched the independent APP “JD.com Self-operated Decoration”.
From rough decoration and old house renovation to fine decoration renovation and villa decoration, with clearly marked prices and free room measurement, JD.com has made home decoration a standardized product that can be “added to the shopping cart” like buying 3C home appliances.
This is not the first time JD.com has touched home decoration.
From the home decoration channel in 2011, to the launch of JD.com in 2020, to the acquisition of the national chain decoration company Lifestyle Home in 2025, JD.com has been on this track for more than ten years.
But this time, it finally engraved the word “self-operated” on the home decoration door.
1. The wildly growing trillion-dollar market
The home decoration industry may be the last trillion-dollar industry in China that is still growing wildly.
Public data shows that the overall scale of China’s home improvement and furnishing market has exceeded 5 trillion yuan in 2025, and is expected to reach the 7 trillion mark in 2030.
This is equivalent to more than twice the entire new energy vehicle market, and is a super track large enough to accommodate countless players.
But the paradox is that in such a large market, no leading national company has a market share of more than 2%.
The top 100 players in the industry combined have a market share of less than 10%.
Everywhere is home to mom-and-pop shops, small companies, and chain brands that may be hit by thunder at any time.
The reason is that the underlying logic of this industry is fundamentally anti-standardized.
The traditional profit model of home improvement is essentially arbitrage on information differences.
We attract people to sign orders at low prices, and then subcontract to foremans at different levels, who then find odd jobs.
Every layer in the middle needs to be peeled off, and the money spent on construction can only be made up by adding items, stealing materials, and reducing workmanship.
A home improvement project involves ten major types of work, hundreds of processes, and thousands of materials. If there is a problem in any link, the owner will ultimately foot the bill.
The skills of workers depend on luck, the construction process relies on tracking, and after-sales rights protection relies on wrangling.
This is not the fault of one company, but is determined by the handicraft genes of the entire industry.
In the past ten years, Internet companies have not come before.
From the earliest Tubatu and Qijia.com to later Alibaba and Byte, most of them followed the light model of traffic platforms, bringing together owners and decoration companies, collecting advertising fees and commissions.
The result?
The platform only cares about customer acquisition, but not delivery, and the chaos remains.
Everyone knows that the home improvement industry is sick, but no one is willing to take drastic measures.
Because heavy medicine means heavy assets, heavy operations, and heavy responsibilities, which means jumping into the mud pit and fighting hand-to-hand with thousands of workers, foremen, and suppliers.
Until this time, JD.com really jumped in with its self-operated genes.
2. Liu Qiangdong made a big bet
JD’s home decoration business is not just a whim.
As early as 2011, JD.com launched a home furnishing channel, but at that time it only sold building materials and furniture, with pure e-commerce logic; in 2020, it launched “JD.com Home” in an attempt to open up the entire link from design to delivery; in 2023, it cooperated with iSpace to launch complete products, which generated 300 million GMV in 40 days, but then quickly went silent.
After more than ten years of hard work, JD.com should have figured out one thing. In the home decoration industry, the light model will never work.
If you don’t touch the supply chain, workers, and delivery, you will never be able to solve the core pain points. All Internet empowerment will be castles in the air in the end.
So this time, Liu Qiangdong chose the path that no one dared to take – self-employment and heavy asset management.
How heavy is it?
First, buy the company directly to supplement offline delivery capabilities.
In June 2025, JD.com took control of Sichuan Life Home, a chain decoration company, and directly acquired offline stores and construction networks covering more than 20 cities.
Coupled with its full presence in Jingdong MALL across the country, a closed loop of online customer acquisition and offline experience delivery has been formed.
Up to now, JD Home Decoration has been launched in 18 core cities, with a total area of live exhibition halls exceeding 80,000 square meters.
Second, directly supervise workers and eliminate the middle layer of contractors.
This is the most cruel move.
JD.com currently directly manages more than 5,200 industrial workers covering ten major types of work, implements 108 standard processes and 705 quality inspection standards, and has a five-star worker certification system for hierarchical management.
In other words, workers do not work for contractors, but for JD.com. JD.com pays wages, sets standards, and JD.com guarantees quality.
This time, the roots of the traditional home decoration model have been dug up.
Third, build your own supply chain and squeeze out water from the source.
JD.com has established a professional procurement and sales team of more than 500 people. Its super supply chain covers 14 countries around the world, with tens of thousands of square meters of self-built warehouses and centralized procurement and distribution of main materials.
This is JD.com’s business that has been in business for more than 20 years. It has directly copied the “self-operated direct procurement + source price control” model proven in the home appliance 3C field to the home decoration track.
According to JD.com, it wants to reduce decoration costs by 30%.
This number sounds exaggerated, but if you know that building materials usually go through five or six levels of price increases from the general agent, regional agent, dealer, designer, and foreman from the factory to the owner, you will understand how much water there is in the middle.
Fourth, self-operated and brand endorsement.
0 additional commitments, a 5-year warranty for the entire home, a 10-year warranty for water and electricity, two years of free on-site inspection, and a worry-free decoration insurance of up to 1 million yuan, covering decoration interruptions, runaways, house losses, etc.
To put it bluntly, it is to turn the “luck-taking” matter of decoration into something like buying JD.com’s self-operated home appliances, with brand endorsement, a platform to back it up, and someone to contact if there is a problem.
3. AI empowers home decoration
However, if there are only heavy assets, then JD.com is just a “bigger decoration company”.
What really makes this thing imaginative is the injection of AI.
In March this year, JD.com simultaneously launched the “AI Smart Home Decoration” brand, deeply embedding the JoyAI large model into the entire decoration process.
In the design process, AI can generate a 3D design plan in minutes, automatically match the material list and precise budget, and then cooperate with 101 design masters and thousands of full-time designers for optimization.
In the past, if you chatted with a designer for three hours, the picture he drew might not be what you wanted.
But now, after entering the house type and requirements, you can see the effect of the whole house in ten minutes. Even the model and price of each brick are clearly marked.
In the construction process, the industrial delivery platform uses AI for full-link automatic scheduling, digital construction site management and control, and 24-hour monitoring of progress and quality deviations.
Owners do not need to go to the construction site every day to follow up. They can see real-time progress, construction nodes, and quality inspection reports by turning on their mobile phones. Every step is traced, and every dollar is corresponding.
This is the real dimensionality reduction attack. It is not to use Internet traffic to transform home decoration, but to use industrialization and digitalization to transform a handmade workshop industry that highly relies on human experience and conscience into a standardized industry that is quantifiable, controllable, and replicable.
Xu Ran, CEO of JD.com, said something very accurate: “We must promote the decoration industry from the era of assembly machines to the era of brand machines.” This statement is very vivid.
Twenty years ago, when Chinese people bought computers, they went to computer stores to buy them. They picked the CPU, motherboard, and graphics card themselves, and the boss assembled them for you.
You have to know the ropes, otherwise you will be ripped off, and no one will care about compatibility issues.
Later, branded machines such as Lenovo and Dell came out, with fixed prices, complete machine warranty, worry-free and reliable, and gradually no one bought the machine.
Today’s home decoration industry is in the “era of machine accumulation” back then.
The owner has to find the design, buy the materials, find the workers, and supervise the construction by himself, which is a lot of hard work and can easily lead to pitfalls.
What JD.com wants to do is to be a “brand machine” in the home decoration industry, with standardized products, transparent prices, integrated delivery, and full-cycle after-sales service.
4. JD.com returns to self-operation
Many people may not understand that JD.com’s current life is not easy.
Profits were under pressure in the fourth quarter of last year, and investments were still being made in local life and new businesses. Why do you want to dive into the heavy and slow industry of home decoration?
Viewed in the strategic coordinate system of Jingdong Group, the move of self-operating home decoration is not at all out of the ordinary.
It is another extension of Liu Qiangdong’s strategy of “returning to the essence of self-operation”.
In the past two years, JD.com has experienced a profound strategic correction.
On the takeout battlefield, it switched from a money-burning platform model of subsidies to self-operated catering by Qixian Kitchen; in the commercial and supermarket track, it launched tens of billions of supermarkets and used self-operated direct procurement to fight price wars; on the manufacturing side, it launched a tens of billions of “factory goods replenishment” plan, using a quasi-self-operated model to bind factories.
Coupled with this self-operation of home decoration, a clear main line has emerged. JD.com is fully returning to the comfort zone of “heavy assets, strong management and control, and self-operation to protect the bottom line”.
This is Liu Qiangdong’s best style of play.
Looking further, the deeper logic lies in the fact that JD.com’s fundamentals are migrating from “selling goods” to “selling services”.
The growth ceiling of 3C home appliances is visible to the naked eye, but service-oriented consumption is the future.
From delivering express delivery to delivering food, from selling home appliances to home improvement services, JD.com is replicating the brand mentality of “self-operation + quality + security” from physical goods to the field of life services.
However, it is too early to say that JD.com can rewrite the home decoration industry.
The core reason why the home decoration industry has not been completely transformed by the Internet for decades lies in its “non-standardization”.
Every house has a different layout, every owner has different requirements, and every construction process relies on labor.
Home appliances can be produced and distributed in a standardized manner, but decoration cannot. It is a semi-product, semi-service handicraft industry that emphasizes offline, experience, and delivery, with extremely low error tolerance.
Moreover, direct management of workers sounds great, but if it goes nationwide, the management difficulty will increase exponentially; direct procurement in the supply chain can reduce costs, but there are thousands of building materials categories and many non-standard products, which are far less easy to integrate than home appliances; AI can improve efficiency, but design can be standardized, and construction details are always variable.
Not to mention, traditional decoration companies, building materials manufacturers, and local foremen have been rooted in this industry for decades, forming an intricate network of interests.
JD.com’s self-operated model is essentially revolutionizing the entire intermediary channel and will inevitably encounter fierce resistance.
But on the other hand, it is precisely because it is difficult that this matter is valuable.
In the past, all Internet home improvement players have bypassed the difficulties and only focused on the traffic and information they are good at. In the end, they have become “plug-ins” in the industry instead of “reconstructors”.
This time, JD.com is directly tackling the dirtiest and most tiring core links of the industry, exchanging heavy assets for barriers and standardization for trust.
It may not take off quickly, but once it does, it will be a real industry revolution.
For the entire home decoration industry, a revolution in industrialization and standardization that has been delayed for many years is finally about to begin.
