Making furniture a fashion purchase
By Carole Sloan -- Furniture Today, April 1, 2002
It was interesting to hear the way Ikea North America's President Pernille Spiers-Lopez describes the American view of furniture, its role in the home and the way we buy it.
Maybe it takes someone from offshore to be able to analyze the situation and come up with some fascinating conclusions, and some interesting approaches to make change happen.
Making change happen is the mantra of Crate & Barrel, and its spring catalog is clearly an example of this.
But first, back to Ikea. Their studies have pointed up that Americans stay with their furniture their entire lives. Furniture, Spiers-Lopez noted, is not a fashion purchase, not like cars, not like clothes, not even like such things as housewares.
With a new ad campaign set to launch this fall, Ikea will attempt to help change Americans' minds about their furniture.
For Ikea, of course, design plays a key role worldwide. The company staged its first global design extravaganza at the Milan furniture show in 1995, followed it up a few years later and last week kicked off another round here in New York.
The theme, bringing the inside out and the outside in, challenged designers to create products across all home lines. And they sure did.
Almost simultaneously, Crate & Barrel's spring catalog surfaced, and they too were moving in the same direction, bringing the inside out and the outside in. What a fresh feeling it gave to the heavily furniture-focused catalog.
This was another step in Crate's bid to make buying home furnishings a fashion-driven and fun thing, just like its tribute to a long-term relationship with Marimekko earlier this year, which produced scads of new products in the Finnish company's bold designs, which were anything but tame.
The sales results also were anything but tame. Crate was scambling to get reorders filled. Has anyone had that happen recently?
