Why you bought your couch
26:15 Share

If you're the kind of person whose idea of a good party conversation starts with I heard IT on in P R IT might be time to take your supervened m seriously. Dig yourself out in style in P, R, swag from t, shirts to book helps to the all mighty in P R, told are all at twenty five percent off through the simple first at shop that in P R dito work.

Hey, it's a Manda ironic. Real quick. Before the show, we want to talk about the idea of return on investment on, well, this show, what do you get from point of money? Well, you get two episodes every week that hopefully reveals something you find really interesting about.

The economy is a too for honestly entertaining story that also helps you make decisions. That is the return. But what is your investment time up? sure.

But other than that, planet money is free. That is because we work for N P R. And N P R is public media.

So public media kind of like a public sidewalk or a public park. It's free and made for everyone, no matter where you live or our community you belong to. And yeah, we're getting to the to help us keep giving you this free thing.

But also if you don't give, M, P, R will still be free because it's a public good to help people everywhere understand the news, the economy and what is happening in the world. That is what you are really investing in when you support N P R, A public good, and now isn't especially good at time to give, because giving a tuesday is almost here to sign up, go to plus dot N P R dot work. Support M P R gets sponsor free versions of all our big shows, including this one and bonus episodes, to ask that you are hearing this and you are already a plus listener. You are the best. Thank you again, sign up at plus dot M P R dot work.

This is planet money from epa.

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with a woman named Christian hawkins at no wards gala in high point, north CarOlina. Is this a big night?

So tonight we are celebrating.

celebrating because Christian works at a company that is up for one of the evenings awards. Well, i'm nervous for you.

I know my fingers across exit, but you know what? It's an honor to be nominated. I know that's like we say to say, but is, you know, is the pintal awards. So we're excited to Venus.

There are a couple hundred people here, all dress up like fighter being served cocktails.

The words start. And I made my way of the front, managed to get a seat. There are introductions, and then a series of presenters taking stage. Sorry, when you to speak about.

Finally, the real stars of the evening start to appear on the screen behind the presenters.

When you and I were chosen for this category, we were so excited because we've really enjoy sitting. That's what we're giving me award. And IT looks like you share .

the same enthusiasm you heard, right? The presenters really enjoy sitting. This is the Oscars of furniture and higher evening of the latest stand up furniture and home furnishings categories like home, office and outdoor. This a world category is for the best leather apostate.

The lucky nominees are a wood and leather armchair, a kind of boxy looking leather chair and a swift chair in new buck connect, which I think is a letter and a color and a drink for that matter.

And the winner .

is the chair design .

by burn design. The winner is the woods and leather armchair. The judges are design experts, and they declared this chair winner because it's both strongly model with the not to traditional elements, a standout piece in any settle.

excEllent job boy leather chair. Other big winners, a seventy seven independent light, a stylish recliner. And in the entertainment furniture category, a black and tank denza took the prize. These are some of the finest high and pieces of furniture from .

this past year that brings the end of this awards present. And while these are all very stylized items, this evening isn't just about celebrating the year years winners. It's also about the future of furniture because we're at high point market, the transection event for furniture. The people who come here decide what furniture makers will make over the next few years and what consumers will wanna buy. Thank you for coming out.

This is where friends and furniture are born. Hello, i'm going to plan of money. I'm AManda .

orange and i'm arvs probably ly on a chair or a table or sofa. And you probably think you know why you bought IT because I was come for your blue with the right Price. But what if the style, the color, the cost, maybe even whether you would like IT, our choice is made for you years before you even thought about buying .

that piece of furniture on the show, the city that makes or breaks the furniture world. We travel to high point, north CarOlina a and meet the people who make the bets on whether or not you'll want that coffee blue couch. Hey, sam s got some in here.

I'm in my thunder is in era, had a little help from z on the script. N, P, R is always cooking. No cap.

So when I say giving tuesday is coming, I think you understand the assignment. Please donate today and your gifted donate dim P, R, that work. Thanks, pasty.

Hey, there, it's timer key from the npr politics podcast, and I will keep this quick giving. Tuesday is almost here, the perfect time to support the independent new source you rely on to stay informed. Please give today at donate dot npr dot org. And thank you.

Instead of scrolling mindlessly, engage mindfully with the npr APP with the mix of on demand news stories from the station and your favor pond cast. You can relax without shutting off your brain. Download the N P. R. APP today.

There is the scene from the movie the devil is prada maybe remembered moral. Streep is playing the role of a fashion icon and transaction, and SHE is beating and half way who is dismissive of the fashion industry, dismissive of what he sees as a small difference in style. Maro streep looks at her and her cereal blue sweater and she's basically like you don't get IT. That blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs. And it's sort of a how do you think that you've made a choice that except you from the fashion industry when in fact, you're wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room?

This room where the furniture industry makes the decisions that ripple out into show rooms and catalogues and eventually into our homes is actually more of a small city. We are in downtown high point, so a little background.

north CarOlina, a in this region of in making furniture for over a hundred years. But when a lot of furniture manufacturing left for asia, high point decided to focus on what was left, the marketing, branding, styling, staging, the fashion of furniture. And today there are about thirteen city blocks filled with properties, many of which have been converted into showrooms. This is what makes up high point market.

This is like disney world .

for furniture. Our guide at high point is j and a mize.

Now jay is not exactly the miro stream of the industry. He says there there are some pretty big luberon to fill. But SHE is not not miral streep.

She's A V P at a company called fashion snoop s that specializes in trend forecasting. And she's been in the furniture industry for years and seems to know everyone here. Are you having fun always?

Of course, now I A N A lot n.

oh yeah, this is a hospitality industry and you're in this up. So everybody wants to feed you. What are you? I guess people buy more that way.

Wearing a massive glass and medical building, picture a new mall with each store filled with lighting or betting or tex cells or furniture. We head up to the third floor.

We are on our way to hooker furniture. IT is a hundred year old company and probably one of the giant, I would say.

hocker furnishings. Yes, we know. Anyway, it's one of the largest and oldest furnace manufacturer in the country. Jay has arranged us to meet a friend and client of hers named Caroline hippo.

Caroline is a big deal in this industry. Just one an icon award a few minutes earlier. She's the chief creative officer .

for oker furnishes.

Hi, are you good? You.

we have a hard persons beauty. You look full.

Disclosure, Caroline was not talking to me, just talking to jay was wear this fabulous deep plum code. Then Caroline .

turns to me, hi and you, Caroline, along with hundreds of people.

have spent the past few months designing and displaying furniture in this enormous space.

They have set up one city block worth of sofa, side tables, lighting fixtures, all carefully stage together in venez. Now the buyers here are not regular shoppers. There's no one buying a bedroom set for their home.

High point is a business to business market. The sellers are furnitures manufacturers, companies like oker furnishings. They are here selling their .

latest designs. The buyers include interior designers. But more importantly, the big spenders are reps from the retail stores, think crate barrel, restoration, hardware, wafer, most of those big chains do not, in fact, have their own factories. So twice a year, high point puts on this big market, and the creating barrels of the world come here to buy the furniture they want to sell. In their stories.

You'll see in our show room, we study color and mood.

Caroline takes us through a tour of the different venues to model their latest dining room set or their outdoor furniture. The rooms are set up with show room samples. Es.

here we have the lakeside version, you know, mountain homes, lake homes. And here you're seeing the more screens and the earthy tones.

There's a lot of furniture and so many rooms.

And now we've just walked into a new collection for a this season and called west. We've just left the lake and come to, you know, middle manhattan glam. She's hoping that .

all the retailers who are million through these being ets, that they will see the glares bed or the mosque en chairs, that they will like IT and order them for their stores. This is the point of the week at high point market .

for a long time and decisions about what furniture a company would make would be driven by, well, what do they know how to make? Like, do they make hardwood tables and chairs? Then we'll make that.

But now with the internet, the market is more competitive. Consumers have more choice. So furniture makers are trying to figure out what consumers might want.

And for that, Caroline, in the further your company, higher trend forecasters like j and they ask, what do you think is the next big thing? Basically, together, they make a series of bet about what the consumer will want to buy. And to do this, jane, her colleagues do eight hunt of consumer research.

They're pulling data on retail source. What are people buying? They're looking at social media, water, people searching for, and they're following a media tracker. What topics are people reading about?

They pull all of this together and try to make sense of what the big cultural trends might be. Then they make predictions and all sorts of things, including styles and buying habits and colors. Those predictions helped determine what Caroline and the furniture company decide to make. SHE explains this by bringing up an example, the color .

predictions. Caroline and j points out this one. Really, that color did they .

think is gonna go.

And what color would you say that is hack berry? Ah, yeah, berry. IT could be a architecture judges just came out with, they call beat.

They call IT beat. There's a coach, some sway chairs and some pillows and hackberry jays plum coat. It's actually .

hocker .

nail color.

And yes, if you're wondering this easy somewhat vibes based prediction model, but as i'm looking around seeing this color everywhere like IT, so wait, so did I want .

that color?

I do know .

that's perfect, that that's how working with someone like fashion steps helps .

size there so easy.

I know i'm not ashamed.

Something over. I guess Caroline was also into IT because of jays predictions. Caroline and hooker furnishings have made a bunch of furniture and hacker berry as well as dusty tErica a like those orange pots for plants and a braxy mustard.

So how did they get to these predictions? You think about what's .

going on in the economics of the world, what's going on in the environment that affects how the consumer feels. And then you'll see that translated into the choices they make to furnish their home.

J says that during uncertain times, in times of social people, people are drawn to grounding colors.

darker colors. Yes, so i've said cook very a year and a half ago.

Yes, so that's when the whole process really began. Caroline heard jays prediction about hackberry. They decided they're going to give them a try, but her company doesn't actually weave their own fabric. They have to buy that from other people. So about a year ago, Caroline went to find fabric in that color.

So we then go to a fabric market where we look at five thousand fabrics in four days. It's an it's an ongoing slog.

Caroline and her team go, they pick out some fabrics they like, and of course, they order some styles in hackberry that fabric is they use, swap lester chairs and sofas. And this call process from the initial prediction of hackberry to the hackberry sofa in the showroom, IT moves pretty slowly.

IT takes about a year.

yeah, about a year. Now that the hackberry furniture is here, the big test for Caroline and j will the retailers ordered this week? At high point, we will find out later how this all works out for them.

The next bet that Caroline in jail making is one based on demographics, like who is buying nice furniture. Right now.

the millennia ls are the most important buying group in home furnishings because they are now in their four early forties. yeah. And so, and there are more of them than any other demographic population.

Caroline wants to show us what they've designed for the militias. So we walk to another shower. SHE says .

millennial are buying homes, getting rid of their foot tons, and that I key lunched chair that so many people owned. It's like practice stage of adult td. Now millennial are spending real money .

on furniture. We have a collection called archives, which is for the and millenia .

traditional.

And it's what is that, that is the the, the millennial that are interested in this neo tradition, this media four. And yes.

grani millennia or grand millennial appears to have been named a few years ago.

Think millennial who are into things their grandparent might have phone, but make IT more fun, like wildly fla wall paper or a middle point pillow that says slay all day for the ground.

You know, matchy matchy is not what the near traditional millennia wants. They want items that a focal feeling of the past, but make IT modern.

So for the grading, millennial Caroline has made a bed with a big toughed headboard and a leather despair and a one, a venir table. Jeep points out the table, and IT looks like my dining table, which I inhered from my actual grandmother.

The third and final bet that Caroline walks us through, I bet that people would also like a little wimsey, like a wind back chair with butterflies printed on the favor.

There is a thing about petco and insects right now. There's a nature thing, but not everybody will use that butterfly because it's a little wim circle. But we like a little surprise and delight in our mix, you know, because it's not boring. You know, that's basically .

it's fun and yes.

yeah but it's not the way to oblige the soul, in my opinion.

So after a high point market ended, we wanted to know, did anyone buy what Caroline N. J. Were selling? Were retailers like the create embarrassed of the world putting in orders to buy some of this furniture?

So we did this. We predicted which rooms and things that they would like. And then we'll have a post modem wednesday about IT.

What what did we think was gonna happen? What did happen? What do we need to change and and how do we tweak our color pilot for next season.

the next season? So dip Caroline and jays predictions on how kerry, granny, millennial and butterflies come true. Will these trends be in stores near you soon? That is after the break.

If you want to understand the dream scenario for furniture sellers like hooker furnishings, an example of why they want to be ahead of the trends and why they rely on predictions from forecasters like jay, it's useful to look at this one pretty famous piece of furniture, the cloud coach. But the initial concept .

was to come up with the ultimate sofa. So we SAT down at .

the teams of what is the ultimate ofa. But I had to look beautiful because everything we do has a look visually strong. But I had to sit like a cloud.

And the voice in this ad is the surface designer, timid bolton. He designed the couch for r age, which most people know is restoration hardware. IT was launched back in twenty fifteen.

Now, if you don't know this coach, allow us to describe IT looks like a big White fluff y cloud. It's plush. It's Billy. It's a section IT is the the cloud.

Couch has been so successful. IT made all of these enormous rebels to the furniture industry. Caroline describes IT as the couch that ate the world.

j. Says there are both cultural and practical reasons why this couch blew up. First, the cultural one j says the couch represents the breakdown between church and state, church being the formal living room where you are forbidden to sit, versus the state, which is the then where you would actually lie, run with your friends, eats snacks.

The cloud cout is the peak of this massive cultural change, from formal to relaxed. Think soft baggie pants and fast casual dining, but a out. And especially during the pandemic, everyone wanted a lot of .

casual comfort. Then also because the pandemic, there was a practical reason that couched IT so well.

the cloud card bw up because of convenience. And IT was very popular in covet because I was one of the only products that .

was available. why?

Because you couldn't get anything in and out of china, you couldn't get anything in and out of vietnam. And the way the restriction hardwork works as they are stuck warehouse alth is.

So that means that they had IT .

on IT on hands. No, I want of the only retailers that did. And so it's been a big driver for a lot of their success is their convenience model of being able to like really do, but they call quicker shop.

When I asked a lot of people at high point about this couch, they did not want to talk about IT. Jay, every time I say cloud couch to someone, they're really like upset about IT.

Why ah I think list I think because fundamentally this is a market of esthetics and we know what's what's actually good. And I hate to say this on record, but I will it's a really crappy piece of furniture.

There are many, many tiktok and comments on redit dedicated to complaining about the cloud out, mostly about how the I pillows need to be fleshed up every day or otherwise. IT looks like a disaster or how there's no support. IT feels like just lying on a pile of blankets.

We reached out to restoration hardware, but they didn't comment on customer complaints or the alleged flooding issue.

But even with the backlash, restoration hardware sound low, extra soft cloud out became, I hit.

not for a while they were the only one's selling their coach. But once I was a hit, many manufacturer made dupes the way one executive described to me. Furniture is a knock off industry.

And retailers at all sorts of Price points, from west to rain morn, plan agan to wafer, came to high point where they might buy knock off of that house. Some might cut corners on quality. This is how high fashion furniture moves through the industry and gets less expensive.

Caroline hippo from hocker functions says they have a couch inspired by the cloud couch too. He says it's very hard to copywriting a sofa or an autumn. A company can pattern something more technical like the mechanism in a sofa that's got a pull out bed, but trademarking a slouchy section. Al is fu tile.

Of course, her company would rather be a company that lead, you know, makes the transacting furniture that gets copied, not be the kind of company that just makes droops standing .

in the hooker finishing showroom. I point out of random chair of Caroline, what would happen if you went across market and you saw that chair somewhere else? Like, like, literally.

they would be fussy. But then I would say flattery as a compliment. And we do IT Better really. Seriously, that happens all the time. I would like O D A god, but by the time they floor the copy, you on to the next.

This knock off culture is why many furniture makers have to keep trying to come up with the next cloud couch, minus the problematic pillows.

So how did their bets on grani, milenio, hackberry and butterflies work out?

Two weeks after the end of market, we called Caroline to see what trends worked in, which did not what? What would you say your biggest bets were at hype this season?

Well, we've been studying what the millennial is interested in.

Caroline starts by talking about the collection theyve designed for the grani. Now success would look like getting a lot of orders, so many that they could even start making, or as they call IT in the base cutting. The furniture airline says the orders are still coming in, but her early read on the collection for grani millennial is very good.

We felt so positive ally about this collection that we cut IT actually and have inventory for IT already. And that's a real sound .

of confidence. Cut IT like me, and they cut the wood. They had their factories in vietnam. Es, start making this furniture. Then we talk about their bet on colors.

The dusty care cutters seem to be the biggest draw.

Do you think tera cota might have beat out my favorite hackberry?

I think maybe so, but don't count hackberry out is some what times color is marketing. You know, you use IT to attract attention. But what we find is that usually for some of the newer colors popping into the air world, IT takes a couple of seasons for them to really gain traction and people to figure out how .

they can use IT. Yeah, how to? Berry hasn't taken enough yet. And finally, for their last bet.

how did butterfly print do?

Very well, very, very, very well know. We did IT in a terraced, a and a mustard, and both placed very well, more mostly in pilas, I will say, and shares.

As for a huge viral trend piece, the next cloud couch, Caroline says that IT is too soon to say. I'll spend the next few weeks sorting out exactly what happened at this market.

We do all of our research, but until you see the Whites of the orders as you're not ever sure. So it's always just a happy surprise for me. I never count my chickens until the orders are .

in and she's already getting ready for the next market in spring twenty twenty five.

James sneed produced today's episode with help from willer rubin. IT was edited by just jane and nearby scene levit alex gold. Mark is our executive producer.

Thanks this week to john joe silk men who introduced me to high point with his book showroom city. Thanks also to Tammy covington, eric ross, ben millar, neil saunders, Steve wilcox and the teams at G. J. Styles, terra universe furniture. And for i'm a man, do orange .

and am Erica baris. This is npr. Thanks for listening.

It's almost thanksgiving. And if you're hosting this year, how well do you know how to cook the main event.

a turkey in the grand scheme of things, not actually that hard. There's just a couple of little things you have to keep in mind requires a little bit of planning ahead.

On a new episode of life kit, we talked turkey. Listen, wherever you get your podcast. Holiday travel is stressful, especially you're dealing with family baggage on top of your .

actual baggage. I'm going home. I'm onna. Revert back to old family roles that are stressful. And so this traffic game is the straw that breaking the games back.

But don't worry, we're here to bring you some relief. Listen to the live kit podcast will help you out this holiday season. The marketing for the movie wicked has been in a capable.

There's all the Green and in march and grand in river have been everywhere. But does the movie live up to the hype? We know you've been written for this one. We've seen wicked, and we have thoughts and will get to the mall, including some weirdly heated opinions on defying gravity. Listen to the pop culture happy, our podcast from npr.