Off sea changes, ostriches and dodos
Carole Sloan -- Furniture Today, February 9, 2003
A column written by yours truly for sister publication Home Textiles Today after the 2000 Heimtextil market seems in retrospect to have captured a key turning point in the home fashions business.
For anyone walking the halls that year at Heimtextil in Frankfort, Germany, there was no question the landscape of the home textiles and decorative fabrics business had changed dramatically.
Companies from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Thailand, Morocco, China, Taiwan, Syria, Jordan, the Philippines, Malaysia and Turkey were exhibiting side by side with stalwarts from Italy, Spain, Germany, France and England.
This was the beginning of a big sea change that's continuing to work itself out today.
Then as now, there were problems with a lot of the offerings from these newly emerging players, ranging from poor quality to a lack of technical skill and design sophistication. It also was quite obvious that many of these companies had little grasp of such concepts as design copyrights, exclusivity and distribution.
But many of the savvier companies already have changed and corrected those problems, some faster than others. And in the real world, the fabrics and manufactured products from these companies will continue to affect the way business is done around the world.
For American retailers and manufacturers, a visit to these stands is now a "must" part of Heimtex, and many now routinely shop in the Far East and elsewhere. Many jobbers buy from these companies, and home textiles manufacturers have added goods from offshore suppliers to their domestic offerings.
As we noted some three years ago, anyone not staying up to date and involved in what is happening in the marketplace is playing the role of an ostrich. And many of those ostriches already have gone the way of the dodo bird.
