A pair of Inspiration Theater sessions at The Inspired Home Show provided a view on consumers and specialty housewares retailing that included unique perspectives on what’s been happening and what trends are driving developments in 2024.
The Future Is InSight
Dawn Evans, International Housewares Association
Tom Mirabile, Springboard Futures
Moderator: Peter Giannetti, HomePage News
In the session, The Future Is InSight, Dawn Evans, International Housewares Association director of marketing, Tom Mirabile, principal and founder, of Springboard Futures, along with moderator Peter Giannetti, editor in chief of HomePage News, provided a spotlight on a new initiative develop to distinguish and identify opportunities to reach consumers as they are living their lives today.
The HomePage News InSight Trend Index 2023/24 is an exclusive digital guide that explores emerging and ongoing home and housewares trends via the products and innovations that prompt them. Presented as portfolios that look at consumers from an actionable perspective, under titles that run from “The Great Entertainers” to “The World of Wellness,” HomePage News developed the InSight Trend Index with the IHA and Springboard Futures. Mirabile, in addition to his Springboard Futures role, also serves as a consumer and lifestyle trend analyst for the IHA and HomePage News.
HomePage News will follow the first edition of the index, which included nine portfolios, with another set in 2024. At the session, Giannetti, Mirabile and Evans bridged the gap between what the index revealed in 2023 and how those developments are evolving into the trends emerging in 2024, including those that became more evident in the product presentations at The Inspired Home Show.
Giannatti said the idea behind InSight was to look at what has been happening at trade shows around the world in home and housewares, and bring it home in a curated form that could translate into how businesses in the sector develop new ideas and innovations.
“Trend is a lot,” he said. “It’s not just the style, it’s how it’s made, it’s who it fits within a lifestyle. It is lifestyle.”
From basic beginnings, InSight became a major initiative.
“It quickly took on a life of its own,” Evans said.
As it came to life, the project defined consumers by lifestyles to understand how trends worked in the context of real needs and behavior. Not every trend identified is of the same importance to every company, but the method of organization makes it easy to understand what is applicable to any specific customer base.
Take The Great Entertainers, for example.
InSight assigns multiple personas to the Great Entertainers trend.
“This was a very natural way to define who our consumer is as an entertainer: the Artist, the Contemporist, the Naturalist, the Post-Modernist, the Traditionalist, and, of course, the Great Gifter,” Evans said. “Giving your hostess a gift is very on trend right now as well.”
The artist represents, for example, those consumers who bring people into their homes, and many of the home goods they purchase reflect an affection for craft and representation, including plates with faces that resemble tribal masks. Showcasing creativity is important to the artist and so housewares that have cultural significance tend to appeal. Craft shows up in their preparations for entertainment, as they cook, bake and prepare the hosting experience in ways that are inspiring, imaginative and unexpected, so they are likely to favor products that allow them to tell culturally relevant stories in everything from the menu to after-dinner coffee.
The Contemporist, for contrast, is more concerned with the state of society.
“The trend isn’t about what’s new, it’s about what’s now,” Mirabile said.
Modern looks, sleek design and streamlined silhouettes are considerations for consumers who are the basis of the trend. When thinking about entertaining and what they might purchase to host, they consider technology and form that suggest not just what’s fresh but what might be coming in the next iteration of contemporary trends. And while look is important, so is uncompromising function.
“It’s clean materials, clean finishes,” Mirabile said. “We’re seeing a lot of warming in this, so you’re seeing a lot of woods being added to this look.”
The depth of thought in InSights and its identification of trends at a level that allows them to immediately translate to product development and marketing is a unique attribute of the project.
Pictured L-R: Henrik Peter Reisby Nielsen, Wolfgang Gruschwitz, Scott Kohno
Innovate, Elevate, Captivate: Reinventing the Retail Experience
Wolfgang Gruschwitz, gia expert judge
Scott Kohno, gia expert judge
Henrik Peter Reisby Nielsen, gia expert judge
In the Innovate, Elevate, Captivate: Reinventing the Retail Experience session, gia expert judges Wolfgang Gruschwitz, Scott Kohno, and Henrik Peter Reisby Nielsen provided a view on how retailers are elevating their operation, services, and brand images to create elevated experiences.
Reisby Nielsen made and reiterated the point that retail is not dead, mediocre retail is dead. He said that great retail is about an approach to the business and the customer. It’s not about money and, despite the attraction of an attractive store, just appearance. Rather, it’s about being innovative, daring to dream big, reinvention and embracing new technologies and services. Many great retailers align store and online operations in a way that serves the customer better. However, it is critical to understand that e-commerce, although it has grown, is still the lesser part of the retail pie and its growth is slowing. As such, consumer spending demonstrates that physical retail holds great attraction.
“The store is still king,” he said.
In looking and, in the gia case, judging stores, Reisby Nielsen said it’s necessary to look at what’s before, but the intention behind it is key.
“It is not a beauty contest,” he said. “Global innovation award is not a beauty contest. It’s about rethinking, reinventing, exploring and playing around with new things. So, this is what the competition is really all about, it’s how you’re being innovative, how you’re daring to dream big, and reinventing your business, embracing and playing around with new technologies. It’s not about having the most money. That will not give you the price. That’s what we’ve seen this year, so many great examples of exploring and playing around with new ways.”
He reiterated that mediocre retail is dead.
“There are so many different other options there need to be reasons to stop by,” Reisby Nielsen said.
In the end, though, having a good store isn’t as difficult as it might seem if owners want to create a top store.
“It needs to be easy,” he said. “It needs to be fun. You need to be kind. And it needs to be interesting. If you do that, you have a great store.”
Gruschwitz said the principles that he would expand upon could be summed up as innovate, elevate and captivate.
“As a store, you have to be innovative not only in technique but also in your thinking. To elevate to bring every product higher. Then it gets emotional, and you can captivate people and bring them to the store again and again and again. Otherwise, you will lose them to online or the price issue.”
Even though they aren’t always thinking of you, store runners need to be thinking for the customer.
“What does he need? What problems does he have?” Gruschwitz asked. “If you solve the problems, you are the problem solver. It has not to do with only functional things, you have to make it emotional. It’s not only design, it’s what can you make better for their social life.”
Kohno said the doomsayers come out every year, saying it’s the end of retail, but he argues strongly against the point. He noted that online sales gains are slowing to less than double digits. Everyone shops online, he said, but sometimes, that’s a disappointing experience, which balances expectations to the advantage of brick-and-mortar store shopping.
To energize the store, though, requires attention paid to a customer that has changed in the face of the changing retail landscape.
Market research demonstrates that consumers, especially Gen Z consumers, “shop at brick and mortar stores driven by the immediacy with which they can walk away with a product as well as the ability to see, touch and try a product before buying. That sounds like good old-fashioned retail. Gen Zs are coming back to stores in a big way. They are using technology, but they want the immediate: to touch, smell, feel. It’s a great opportunity for us. It’s all about customer engagement,” Kohno said.
