During the High Point Market, I had a conversation with a design student excited to be attending her first furniture market.
It took me back to my own inaugural visit to High Point more than 25 years ago. The big buildings like the International Home Furnishings Center were there, of course. But other than that, the market today could not be more different.
In the late 1990s, the attendee roster was dominated by large national and regional brick-and-mortar furniture and department store chains, representatives of which traveled in big packs. There were essentially no online home furnishings sales — Amazon had just launched and back then focused on books, actual printed books. There were no influences posting about trends and cool finds — because there was no social media. There was no Showplace. There was no The Point.
It was also a hard, exhausting market to shop, running a full seven days. The Transportation Terminal with its many free buses and shuttles didn’t exist. Neither did food trucks.
Had that young design student I spoke with attended her first market in 1997 as I did, she would have felt far more alone and perhaps not nearly as welcome. Interior designers made up a small percentage of attendees back then, and they sometimes struggled to even step into some major showrooms.
But today, the High Point Market doesn’t just embrace designers, the market is in many ways oriented around them.
And there’s good reason for that. Tammy Covington Nagem, president and CEO of the High Point Market Authority, notes that more than half of market visitors are interior designers. More than half. (Read more about Nagen and HPMA’s commitment to designers, in her own words, in Design News Now’s Champions of Design Entrepreneurship feature.)
We see the importance of designers in the hundreds of seminars and educational opportunities available to them. We see it in the designer-focused showroom tours. We see it in the number of manufacturers that offer trade programs and have staff focused on serving designers. And we see it in the formation a few years ago of High Point x Design, which sponsors designer-focused events both during markets and in the off months, encouraging them to take advantage of the city’s vast home furnishings resources year-round.
Those are just some of the ways that home furnishings vendors and market organizers cater to the design trade.
But I believe designers have, in turn, helped to shape the market in a profound way: In terms of style, the product is better than it used to be.
The industry has always had talented in-house designers — and still does. Just look at the finalists and winners from the latest International Society of Furniture Designers 2024 Pinnacle Awards. Stunning! Simply stunning!
But over the past couple of decades, we’ve seen a dramatic rise in the number of partnerships between manufacturers and interior designers, who bring their vision, style and intimate knowledge of how items work in clients’ homes to the product design collaborations.
And by their sheer numbers and thus increased buying power at market, interior designers shape how products function and look because manufacturers want to meet their needs.
I hope High Point organizers continue to support designers as that student starts her career. And I look forward to seeing how she and her classmates make their mark on the market.