InsideFurniture

UNGROWTH CONSERVATISM: Rising infrequency of furniture purchases grow from sustainable values about quality, function and lifestyle

2009-04-30T11:39:08-04:00

Get ready for ungrowth, a powerful reality forged by rising scarcity and sustainability of resources.

Ungrowth recognizes we cannot have everything, limitlessly, all the time forever. As a virtue, the ungrowth influence will only intensify, especially in consumer goods.

Discernable product quality in the right size and providing the right function are critical elements of progressive and sustainable marketing successes.

Ramifications and implications of ungrowth will affect all we do as individuals and in business.

In home furnishings, the public's emerging ungrowth state of mind will sharpen their focus. That means they are less susceptible and vulnerable to the typical onslaught of variations of false and misleading marketing.

The need for greater leadership and professionalism across all industry segments cannot be emphasized enough.

Ungrowth underscores a buy once, buy right mentality of personal conservatism. Across the socio-economic spectrum , people will be investing wisely in what they purchase for a new and sustaiable standard of living.

In home furnishings, it means greater infrequency of purchases, especially in casegoods, with multifunction as the bonus. For upholstery, the ability to reupholster will be an important factor.

Interior designing will give way to individualized home dressing, and that will elevate decorative accessories. They will be in sharper focus and a more frequent purchase as economical cosmetics for home sparkle.

The growth of ungrowth as an economic force has always existed. Its reality heightened with our painful, acute awareness of the implications of our current economic travail, which may be, thankfully, a needed life-saving attitude adjustment.

Smart merchandisers will benefit from the precious wisdom of sensibly appealing to hearty 1930s Depression Era virtues of intelligent frugality and the need to identify real value from bona fide quality, value and function.

Ungrowth's smart parsimony emphasizes: Buy the best you can and keep it as long as you can.

The marketing message will be critical. That is the reason telling and retelling the story of quality will resonate and drown the hollow buoyancy of cheaply made furniture that only looks good and will need replacing.

The Greening of the Consumer means a total rejection of built-in obsolesence.

The marketplace response to flashy price-driven marketing will be consistent with the current societal transformation recognizing real value: Been there, done that. Been screwed before. No more. Go away. You are not interested in my values.

PIECE ON DEARTH: Less is more from distinction and differentiation critical in marketing to smart consumers as rugged individualists

2009-04-28T08:59:35-04:00

Wither the big brown furniture boys futilely flogging their flagging collections in the winds of change blowing them away.

The winners at the Spring High Point Market are conscious purveyors of distinction, primarily from aggregating and presenting a delicious assortment of individualized looks, styles and designs.

It is crafted produce from the fields and orchards of ingenuity, an ordered chaos of attractive harmony. The appeal is timeless differentiationn, an individualism that people feel, want and need, especially women whom the furniture boys pejoratively call the end-user.

In procreating comfortable interiors, the distinctive design impulse arises from gender survival and preservation. Honed for millennia, women seek attraction and flourishes to validate themselves, family and friends.

Yes, the impulse incorporates home furnishings. Home dressing is so much a part of a woman’s soul. It influences most decisions from shopping to home life.

That’s why big brown banal furniture collections repel women precisely because the suited output is illsuited and lacks individualized distinction we all cherish.

In much the same way women cringe in the midst of another woman wearing the same garments at a special event, a similar drive for home distinction directs her attention in the world of home furnishings.

All these years later it’s back to the future with a fresh sense and appreciation for real eclecticism, a key element in effective marketing.

The future is in bold and subtle statements of distinction that command attention and validate personal discretion while preserving the need and integrity of sustained comfortable living.

Bid farewell to the banal big brown furniture boys and their tailored suites of sameness sinking in a sea of change.

LOW PRICES HIGH ANXIETY: Dropping prices to induce sales is desperate flypaper marketing

2009-04-10T11:10:32-04:00

You can always sell a salesperson. Just look what’s happening now. In a flurry of e-blasts, desperate vendors are eagerly dropping their mercantile trousers to get business. A hairy sight, for sure.

Fooling themselves, manufacturers want to fool retailers. It may work again only to peter out for no other reason than artificially dropping prices without in-place operational efficiencies can be lethal. Death not be proud, the profit poet writes about a wrong.

Instead of a executing a flexible business and marketing plan based on meeting needs of consumers, too many furniture makers reflexively feel comfortable in retrogressing. They are doing what they know best — desperate price cutting — because they may not know what else to do because they don't ask or think they know it all. H-m-m-m-m-m. Have you heard? Some KIAs (know it alls) are going out of business.

Rampant price cutting a path to the next turnaround is cutting off your knows to spite your place really to succeed, and that place is identifying ways to meet the needs of consumers. The next turnaround in the making now is the mother of all turnarounds, taking no prisoners attempting a hope-filled mercantile Bataan death march back to business.

Manufacturers only wanting to sell, sell, sell rely on their own hope-based voodoo methods. They have a surprise coming. Hope isn’t a strategy to stimulate sustained business. Hope without a substantive plan is skywriting always blown away by the winds of reality.

My friend and fellow marketing dude Eric Bauer sums up the current spate of sales prevention tactics, saying, “Too many desperate companies are doing anything just trying not to lose.”

If you’re in business trying not to lose, then you’re not executing a plan to win. In the game of business, hoping not to lose means every moment, metaphorically, is being at bat in the bottom of the Ninth Inning with two out, two strikes, no on on base and down by seven runs.

Unfortunately, the game is over for hope-based marketing.

NEW BUSINESS FROM OLD: Marketing to satisfied consumers may be the salvation

2009-03-05T16:35:00-05:00

If good business is all about building and sustaining lasting relationships, it seems to make sense for merchants to call on satisfied consumers.

Instead of investing precious dollars on attracting new business from new customers, perhaps getting new business from old customers will be more economical and advantageous.

Savvy merchants can mine detailed customer lists, providing they have them, and the probability is the data is too hard to retrieve or nonexistent. Too bad for the unprepared.

A satisfied customer confirms a relationship, permitting respectful queries about needs and wants within a friendly marketing context.

The message is the same: living better and more comfortably with furniture. Be a friend of people who want ways of seeking comfort in their homes, where they are spending more time.

A honest message will resonate among people adopting a Great Depression Era virtue of finding and honoring real value from trustworthy friends and merchants.

The new normalcy of the economy benefits the purveyors of trusted relationships.

INCONVENIENT TRUTHS: Lack of message cohesion, professionalism and congealed focus on consumers and more . . .

2009-02-03T12:39:36-05:00

Some of the inconvenient truths about the furniture industry:

·         Always misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity

·         Fair, tough czar needed

·         Innovate or evaporate

·         Fragmentation kills, breeds mediocrity

·         Manufacturers only want to sell to retailers

·         Retailers know little about consumers

·         Too much retail and manufacturing duplication

·         China forces race to the bottom

·         Advertising lacks practicality, incisiveness

·         Honesty and truth builds and sustains relationships

·         Fear of mutual collaboration

·         Most executives are marketing challenged

·         Consumers are smarter than industry

·         People distrust furniture advertising

·         Celebrity licensing usually fails

·         Retail "clearance centers" erode sales of running line goods

·         Smart differentiation succeeds

·         Comfort, design and living better outsells price

·         Too many egos not enough wisdom

·         Manufacturers caught with their plants down

·         Marketing is antiquated, self destructive, misleading

·         Trade show (Market) model inadequate

·         Trade publications are witting enablers, pander to advertisers

·         All that’s Green isn’t gold

·         True analysis missing in industry news

·         Best practices need greater awareness

·         Trade associations lack progressive punch

·         Conscientious retailers prefer to work showrooms into the evening instead of attending costly market entertainment

·         One all encompassing association needed for progress

·         Warring High Point showrooms diminish market cohesion

·         Industry recycles failed leaders: Screw up move up

·         Most market seminars are self-aggrandizing fluff

·         Retailers are undisciplined

·         Regional Las Vegas Market siphons precious marketing funds

  Manufacturers mismanage, distrust sales representatives

·         More professionally certified retail designers needed

·         Off shore manufacturing killed brand equity

·         Real merchants are in touch with consumer dreams, wishes and aspirations

There are many more inconvenient truths. Please share them for the common good: ivan@insidefurniture.com

FIT VERSUS FITTEST: In the future, only the 'fit' retailers and manufacturers will overcome the 'fittest'

2009-01-07T03:17:00-05:00

Blognote: Amazingly apt, the prescient blogservation appearing below was posted on December 6, 2004. Its message is as crisp now as it was four years ago.

Imagine the furniture industry as a dense forest. All the flora prevails, from the smallest to the largest, trees and shrubs and moss and ivy. It’s all there thriving in a controlled environment, very predictable.

All of a sudden, the environment changes, no matter how, it just does. Say, a big swath of the forest is cut, opening the sky to allow the sun to come it.

Which entities of the furniture industry will survive now: The fit or the fittest? Of course, the fit will prevail. In a maritime metaphor, the swift boats out maneuver the oil tankers!

In furniture, the fit and flexible will survive to anticipate and adapt, pounce-like to the opportunities of change. These companies are ready for the sunlight’s radiating and nourishing power.

In the furniture industry for an insufferable period of time, leadership is driven from the perspective of the rearview mirror of same-ole conferences, meetings and methods.

Short term thinking is projected as vision, in looking backward to see the future.

To move forward, the industry has to be fit to move forward. Right now, smaller retailers and manufacturers are poised to scale up and succeed over the behemoths that always receive the fawning attention.

Where are the fit leaders, willing to climb out of their Hummers and get on the ground to grow?

The industry has to write the book, “Who moved my furniture,” and realize they can’t see the trees for the forest, unless the bright sunlight of change suddenly appears.

REASON FOR BEING: The guiding force our industry needs to be consumer satisfaction based on a sacred responsibility of furnishings people’s homes

2009-01-06T14:24:43-05:00

We are in a painful, yet rewarding economic and political transition. These challenging times will pass, with the experience forcing all of us to reassess our core values. In many ways, we are asking: What is truly important in our personal and professional lives?

Yes, we are more skeptical, even cynical. Why?: The greed-based betrayals of Wall Street, the vacating of fiduciary responsibility, failure of political institutions and an an individual and collective abandonment of acting for the greater good.

The skepticism is healthy, helping us reorder life’s priorities. With discovery and delight, more people recognize our personal successes cannot be attained if we fail to serve as our brothers and sisters’ keepers.

The furniture industry will do well in reassessing its core values, purpose and mission. From all quarters, top to bottom, bottom to top, and side to side, the change is long overdue.

Again, a new year brings us to our senses, as we need to create a more acute new ear to hear and clear vision to see how working for the greater good opens opportunities for personal possibilities. We are only as good as the garden in which we are growing.

As I do every six months, I repost a resonating blogservation under the rubric:

SACRED RESPONSIBILITY OF FURNISHING PEOPLE'S HOMES

With renewed surprise, it seems many furniture retailers and manufacturers keep rediscovering a verity: Consumers actually affect the nature and quality of their business.

Over the years, myriad stories abound in the mostly ingratiating trade press, which continuously propounds, heralds and attests to the importance of consumers. Those editors possess a firm grip on the obvious. The next revelation from their perches is: Fish swim.

Likewise, in virtually every industry conference, seminar and workshop — directly and indirectly — during the past several years, at least one session devotes itself to “listening” to consumers. More astounding perspicacity.

Over the years, all the millions of dollars invested in apparently redundant studies and superfluous research about consumers’ attitudes about shopping for furniture seems to be a misallocation of resources.

Most of the findings are always the same. JUST IN, BREAKING NEWS!: People, also known as consumers, dislike the furniture shopping experience for all the reasons known: blind item, inability to discern value, no quality benchmarks, logistical frustrations, lack of professionalism, yada, yada, yada.

Incidentally, the more important research —valuable ethnographic insights — on how people use, buy and think about furniture is absent from pervasive access to be of real significance.

As mentioned, consumers, who pay the bills for the furniture industry, repeatedly respond to researchers with unambiguous declarations (fulminations) of frustration and disgust about their furniture shopping experience. In many stores, consumer-respondents say they want and deserve honest treatment and respect.

H-m-m-m, maybe some kind a problem (for the optimists: an enshrouded opportunity) really exists?

If not, why would so many people voluntarily speak out? Only to get a better deal? To wait until Y3K to pay? To exult in blowout prices? To praise clever advertisements that expect people to become mercantile lemmings and just buy without as much as a sentence about living more comfortably? Not likely.

Should anybody in the industry really express surprise and incredulity that consumers are actually sincere, and that they are deadly serious about furnishing their homes? That they want to live comfortably?

Could any doubt exist that consumers reasonably expect retailers, as well as an entire industry, to be in positive synchronization with their dreams, wishes and aspirations about wanting the best they can afford for their homes (especially now when the home is more of a haven)?

What other reason would people want retailers to practice a mercantile Golden Rule in the marketplace: Do not do unto others what you wouldn’t want them to do to you. That means no tricks, no gimmicks and no phony discounts and all the supporting blandishments that characterize and taint the industry.

Given the industry’s avowed desire for building lasting relationships in the marketplace, a powerful question comes to mind: What is the real purpose of being in the furniture business, anyway?

If the simple, reflexive answer is only to make a profit, perhaps that is part of the problem. Just making a profit cannot be the compelling solution to improving the nature and quality of the furniture business. Some businesses will, and usually do anything to make a profit. More than a few have gone out of business just trying to make a profit.

For all the feel-good talk about moving the industry to a higher performance and service level, the answer to my question about the reason for being in business may have more to do with purpose and responsibility than in making money.

Wait a moment before jumping to conclusions. With no delusions here, a business needs to be profitable and well managed to remain in business. Duh!

Again, the purpose and responsibility of business needs to be, first, satisfying consumers in every way possible, to earn the financial rewards, the profits, to remain in business.

Appreciating the difference is the difference, especially in difficult times.

Our industry, at every level, must realize that all of us, no matter how detached we are from serving consumers, are really involved in the sacred responsibility of furnishing people’s homes.

When consumers enter a furniture studio or store, they are involved in the sacred responsibility of furnishing their homes. They aren’t concerned with the material well being of the sales people or the store’s executives and owners.

For consumers, furniture is not about inanimate lumber, metal and cloth. Furniture is about all what constitutes a critical part of a home, where people live, learn, yearn, laugh, cry and die. It is the place where values are held and transmitted.

You say, all the warm and fuzzy talk about responsibility doesn’t mesh well with business? Consumers would dramatically challenge that negative assertion, and have been saying so for years in redirecting their discretionary spending.

If the excitement of serving and satisfying consumers doesn’t guide us, no matter where we are in the supply and service chain, then maybe we’re in the wrong business. Ever think of that?

Furniture is exciting, and helping people furnish their homes is a high calling and a sacred responsibility best summarized in the Pirkei Avot (usually translated as Ethics of the Fathers), in which the Jewish sage and influential rabbi Hillel addressed the subject of sacred responsibility:

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?

REALITY OF "MOTION" FURNITURE: An industry fighting to preserve stationary furniture in a dynamic world blinds itself to the realities of survival

2009-01-05T10:13:23-05:00

Heady stuff, but true. For all of us Cassandra’s, we enjoy perverse delight yet sadness in saying, “Told ya so.”

What follows is my e-response to friend David Williams, a forward thinking High Pointer locked in the cauldron and crucible of a status-quo-seeking industry.

He sent it me and others as a reminder of the documentary he co-produced. It is about the reality and despair of the closing of a Hooker Furniture plant.

First. David’s e-blast reminder:

Friends:

As many of you know, I was privileged to be a part of the documentary film "With These Hands," a 79-minute film that chronicles the closing of Hooker Furniture's last domestic plant in Martinsville, Va. in 2007.

The idea for this project began when I introduced myself to Matt Barr, a documentary film professor at UNC-G (University of North Carolina at Greensboro), at the premier of his last documentary.

As a result of a lot of luck and financial help from UNC-G and other contributors, Matt was able to complete this documentary in two years. It is a sad, but honest story about the end of a way of life of which many of us have been a part.

The film begins with Clyde Hooker's recollection of being held up by his grandfather to blow the company's steam whistle to open the plant in 1924.

It then follows the last load of raw lumber as it enters the plant to be cut, sanded, assembled, finished, and loaded on trucks as beautiful bedroom furniture.

Along with Mr. Hooker and the Factory the film's other focus is the recollections of ten production workers, who talk about their experiences at Hooker, the skills that they learned along the way, and their feelings, as they realize that their factory is closing and that the world in which they have known for many years is coming to an end.

"With These Hands" is scheduled to be shown at Elliot University Center at UNC-Greensboro at 8:00 p.m. on Friday, January 30, 2009. I hope that you will be able to join us and share the experience of viewing this documentary together.

David H. Williams, Associate Producer

Here’s my response (with some changes):

David, I will be there.

Your film is prophetic and metaphorical.

The home furnishings industry is dead, along with other industries that failed to distinguish between stationary and motion furniture: They sought to be static in dynamic capitalism always stoked by change.

Our industry fought hard to preserve the status quo, as it waved the American flag, spoke of rugged individualism and free enterprise, but failed to be responsible to themselves, workers and the need to change.

All the so-called vaunted institutions, mostly the associations and trade publications, have aided and abetted the demise, acting as complicit yes-men, always foisting product over process and ideas, failing to recognize turbulence as normal and stability as the exception.

The operative words are punctuated equilibrium, stretches of static activity eventually jolted by reality change. It is analogous to an earthquake fault. We're not prepared but believe we are.

Your movie will be more successful if you allow professors and others to discuss the harsh realities it represents, not just the sadness.

We don’t cry when the deciduous trees lose their leaves because we know in the spring the new season of efflorescence will prepare us for the next winter.

Let’s talk soon.

Ivan

YEAR OF POSITIONING: Reinvention is absolutely necessary as values shift

2009-01-02T13:17:40-05:00

Unless the furniture industry helps people create a better living environment, the recovery will be a rough road.

The end of push marketing is here for good. People want to discover and create what is best for them, not reflexively adopt what retailers and manufacturers want push.

That is the reason for constant reinvention, which is positive tension geared to meeting the needs of people not the desires of retailers and manufacturers.

For too long the supply chain has been self absorbed, always thinking of itself, always pushing product instead of marketing to needs.

Self serving trade associations and timid publications are in need of a jolt of reality. Gone are the facile leadership conferences, workshops and seminars oozing quick solutions for complex issues.

More analysis and responsible discussions are in order, and will be a greater part of this blog in 2009.

Artwork — Open Mind — from the talented artist, Slauz.

Happy New Year 2009

2009-01-01T13:56:03-05:00

Best wishes from the Cutlers: Ivan, Alexa, Wendee and Candy