Well as hard as it is to believe that it's 2009, add even more disbelieve that Stuart, Dwayne, and I have already been to Market (in ATL) and are back. I think we say it every year, but this Market was harder and weirder than ever!
First off, we were down in Atlanta a few days early because we were designing another showroom, Vickerman (we hope to have pics up soon). So we were ready to go on Day 1, which was Tuesday Jan 6 at 9am. Now....we are usually there before the show starts anyway, finishing up Roman's showroom with a little of this and that, so being down early was nothing new, and we knew how the first day usually goes....fairly busy. Well, as we entered Building 1( the Market is called AmericasMart, and now has 4 buildings, which total 11.5 million square feet...yes..that's right million!), we noticed no one around...as we road the escalators up to the 18th floor...there was still no one! We actually stopped off, and checked to make sure we were there on the right day and at the right time...it was like a ghost town....weird. We had never seen anything like that!
Eventually people showed up through the week. Traditionally, the weekend is the busiest. It makes sense. A lot of store owners, mom and pop establishments lets say can't afford to take off during the week to leave the store, so instead they just wait until the weekend. The Market was still down, I think one of our vendors said that they were down 30% dollar wise. We were wondering how people would react to the economy, and you could definitely tell that people were scared to spend money, that is except for us, lol. We heard from many retailers that they were down around 40% last year....fortunately, we were blessed and were down nothing like that. Actually there's a retailer here in Lex that was down 80% in the last quarter....scary people...scary....
BUT enough about bad things...lol as if the media doesn't letter us forget...sometimes I wonder if they would just shut up people might not feel they way they do....
The market was hard in many ways, as to be expected, prices had went up like they do every year, so we had to weed through them! Also, it appears that many of our vendors were afraid to go out and make custom themes, and just went with what the factories had over seas (except for the JSD Designs products, they were all original! :) ) See, products get made in a few ways. 1: Our American vendors have product development teams that read trends and forecasts, and then develop product that they want to sell, then send that over seas to Foreign Factories to be made. 2: The American vendors come up with ideas and patterns, and then apply that designs and items they see over seas 3: Just buy what they see when they go overseas (foreign factories have their own showrooms, where American Vendors can walk through to get ideas) or 4: A mix of all of the above.
Truthfully, most of the time it is " a little of all of the above" ; however, this year, it appears that they just all bought what they saw, because truthfully all showrooms at Market looked 85/90% the same. I believe that this was possibly true because it's less expensive to buy something that a factory has in production alread, as well as probably will sell many of them to multiple vendors, not just one to having something created custom and have a limited run on quantity.
So we were left to delve in the mess, and make something unique and custom for us. And I think we did a really excellent job! It was very hard, I mean very hard! But as always fun, and exhausting...both mentally and physically!
Believe it or not, things are already coming in! We're trying to get those things priced and ready to go out soon!
Gotta run..Hope to see you soon!
J
