HomePage News presents InSight+, an exclusive curator’s perspective on the creation and presentation of the HomePage News InSight Trend Index 2023/24.
The InSight Trend Index is a first-of-its-kind, comprehensive digital report examining emerging and enduring home and housewares trends through products and innovations that embody them. The InSight team explored influential industry trade shows in the U.S. and abroad to identify global trends driving growth and expansion across home and housewares categories.
The trend index features nine portfolios ranging from at-home entertaining and outdoor living to trends in material and color, culminating with a look at the encompassing wellness trend. The portfolios represent how consumers are living, the evolution of their lives and homes, and what we found to be the roots of ongoing consumer lifestyles that drive trends.
This special video presentation features InSight report curator author and industry trend analyst Tom Mirabile, founder of Springboard Futures, and report designer Dawn Evans, director of marketing for the International Housewares Association. Mirabile and Evans will take you behind the curtain to show how each of the nine InSight trend portfolios came into view. They explain why now a pivotal time for such a vivid exploration of trends in lifestyle, design, function and materials that drive today’s innovations; and how the HomePage News InSight Trend Index can be used as a practical tool for manufacturers and retailers cultivating the next growth opportunities for home and housewares.
The pandemic, like few periods in the history of the home and housewares business, illuminated the importance of trend — and what matters most to consumers. Post-pandemic, amid new market challenges, the business can’t be simply transactional. Success requires distinguishing from competitors and communicating in the clearest terms about your products, your brands and your relevance. In tighter market conditions, what now might be about taking market share will soon need to be about driving growth across an industry. How supplier and retailer brands tell their stories will depend on how they read their markets. The perspective will be different from business. But these are the new rules of engagement.
The HomePage News Trend Index applies years of expertise and analysis to understand where the consumer hot spots are… and where they’re headed.
It connects and synchronizes teams that run a business. It illustrates how they can think, create and execute as a team. Product development, marketing and merchandising can’t occur in a tunnel leading to so-called magic price points. Consider the InSight Trend Index a model for how intuitive, informed and industrious lifestyle product creation and selection can build a sustainable lifestyle business. And how that requires a collaborative team effort.
The HomePage New InSight Trend Index is a collaborative team effort by Mirabile of Springboard Futures, Evans of IHA and the entire HomePage News team. It is also a collaboration with and for the home and housewares industry. In a way, our roles in bringing this unprecedented trend report to the market stand as a metaphor for how retailers should shop trade shows… to look for more than products… to look for consumer-driven experiences and solutions.
With help from today’s deeper perspective on why trends matter more than ever and how that fueled the InSight Trend Index, we encourage you to take another look at each of the report’s trend portfolios. See how it all adds up to provide what we hope is a truly inspiring view on how to curate home and housewares success.
The HomePage News Insight Trend Index will evolve in 2024 to support the next wave of trend-activating home and housewares products. Future installments of the report showcasing evolving and new trend portfolios will showcase added marketplace intelligence and data to provide greater depth to the trends discovered and explored by InSight and the forces that drive and sustain them.
InSight, is, indeed, a powerful tool.
— Peter Giannetti, Editor-in-Chief
