What Tabletop & Furniture Want For The Holidays

With retailers already promoting like it’s the weekend before Christmas, it’s hard to look past the next three months. But now is actually when the first half of 2016 should start coming into focus, especially for tabletop and furniture companies preparing for the New York and High Point markets previewed in the October 12, 2015, issue.

Turn The Corner

These fall markets often provide barometers on how the year will finish for home furnishings while gauging, more importantly, how retailers are planning for the coming year. It has become a popular guessing game among tabletop and furniture suppliers and retailers as to whether the next year finally will be the year when two industries slowed by tighter discretionary spending turn the corner with renewed vigor.

Need has been trumping want in these businesses for a number of years. Many tabletop and furniture marketers have countered by attempting to straddle a line between a traditional fashion emphasis and a shift to enhanced utility that presumably syncs with today’s more practical consumer mindsets.

Maybe, just maybe, though, the foundations of the general economy and housing markets are stable enough again that consumers no longer need a litany of bells and whistles, like they might find on a blender box, to justify replacing flatware or table lamps that are a bit worn and outdated but otherwise acceptable.

It has become seemingly compulsory to engineer added utility into just about every home product in an effort to cajole reluctant consumer dollars. But the beauty of the tabletop and furniture businesses is still very much the beauty of tabletop and furniture. And as consumers loosen up a bit, many hope styling reasserts its role as an emotive elixir of increased discretionary spending on tabletop and furniture.

Carefully Considered 

Marketers have explored many ways to add value to tabletop and furniture. And there have been myriad compelling and beneficial functional advances. These businesses thrive, though, when people are more inspired by how the products will look in their homes than how they might perform.

Purchases of tabletop and furniture, like most products, will remain more carefully considered by a consumer base indelibly changed by the uncertain economic backdrop of much of the past decade.

Finally Ready

But maybe, just maybe, more consumers are finally ready, after several years of it-can-wait attitudes when it comes to updating their dinnerware or accent chairs, to indulge in what they want despite what they might need.

We know that’s what everyone in tabletop and furniture wants as they turn the corner toward 2016.