By Chris Stout-Hazard
The furniture industry is obsessed with trends. While most of us think of this as a necessity to showcase new products and stay “on top” of what consumers are demanding, the reality is a bit more complicated. Yes, styles and preferences continue to shift year after year. But if you step back to watch the industry as a whole, this looks less like boldly charting a course to develop new looks and more like a bunch of companies chasing each other around in circles.
Just take a moment to read what consumers are saying on social media or in the comments section of any shelter magazine’s pages. Every post that confidently states what is “in” or “out” is accompanied by a chorus of customers pushing back. “I don’t care if they say no one wants green velvet anymore – I still love it!” and “What is with all of these boneless sofas? I hate that.”
Sure, for every person complaining, there is another who is enthusiastic about moving to the latest look. But the buying public is far more heterogenous than we might like to think. Most Americans aren’t replacing their furniture every year, and there is no lock-step adoption of styles at the pace with which the industry moves. What is out-of-style with one audience may still be beloved by another, and as quickly as something goes out of fashion with one crowd it can be reinvigorated by another.
While I like to think of myself as very much connected to the latest styles – and admit that I am often pretty burnt out on many looks by the time they reach mainstream adoption – I am not the customer. For our brand, it is critical that we find a happy medium between pushing our range forward while continuing to deliver products that meet continuing demand. We’ve found that customers often come to us with statements like, “I’m so glad you still offer this because I can’t find it anywhere else.”
In technology, there is an adoption curve. It’s a bell-shaped graph with innovators and early adopters at one end, laggards at the other and the majority in the middle. Think of the first person you know that had a smartphone – that’s an early adopter – verses the last person to get one. Clearly, the biggest profits are for companies serving that large middle market.
The tech curve only lives through one cycle. An adoption curve for design should look more like a triple helix. Trends repeat on themselves, with one style getting boosted by trend leaders latching on to a look, popularizing it for the mainstream, and then the look fading in popularity. But then, something wild happens – that look is made fresh again by a new group of trend leaders. So, for instance, an English roll arm sofa (which seems to never go out of style for us, even if the audience makeup continues to shift) gets rediscovered over and over again.
We often find ourselves building “granny-style” sofas for actual grandmothers AND their fashion-forward grandkids at the same time. Dropping styles too aggressively would mean we had failed to serve the late adopter audience and potentially miss out on the leading edge of the reboot of that style.
Should furniture brands ignore trends? Of course not. But we should be a bit savvier in managing our portfolios to avoid turning away slower moving audiences as well as the early-phase adopters looking to make the old new again.
Chris Stout-Hazard is the co-founder of the North Carolina-based custom furniture company Roger + Chris, known for designing and manufacturing personalized, American-made furniture.
