Antique reproductions may be next foot in door
By Jeff Linville -- Furniture Today, January 19, 2003
Toronto — Youth furniture sales could fizzle over the next decade while antique reproductions might pick up, a Toronto economist and demographer told marketgoers at a seminar here.
David K. Foot, best-selling author and professor of economics at the University of Toronto, said the post-World War II baby boom generation fueled the recent surge in youth furniture.
But boomers are now mostly past childbearing age, and their children, the so-called echo generation, are in their teens and early 20s, beyond the need for juvenile furniture themselves but too young to be buying it for their kids, he said.
Youth sales could pick up again in 10 years or so as the echo generation settles down and starts families, Foot said.
That also could give a boost to promotional furniture retailers as echo-ers furnish first homes.
Meanwhile, aging baby boomers will be looking to buy better-quality furniture, and the industry could find success and better margins with such product as antique reproductions, he said.
Foot's series of books, "Boom, Bust & Echo," have sold more than 300,000 copies in English and French and spent more than three years on the best-seller list of Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail.
He also discussed the potential impact of widely varying birth rates around the world. Canada, he said, was averaging about four children per family in 1960, but that is now about 1.5. The United States had a similar decline, from a little under four kids in 1960 to about two per family now, offset somewhat by a much higher birth rate among Hispanic families.
The birth rate is even higher in Mexico, which should continue to provide an ample work force for companies opening factories in that country, Foot said.
And North American companies might look closer at Indonesia for future offshore furniture plants, since that country is now the fourth largest in the world and its greatest population density is in the under-five segment, he said.
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