This year’s furniture seminar: The main points
The start of the Christmas month also became the start of this year’s major furniture seminar.
On December 1, we at Lifestyle & Design Cluster welcomed everyone inside at our consortium partner VIA Design, who had provided the fine premises at Angligården available.
The day featured presentations for furniture business with a community based on the three themes for the day; new trends, new markets and new channels. Here, several presentations rounded up with dominant topics that filled the agenda.
Our director, Betina Simonsen welcomed the 130 designers’ attendees, business owners and managers as well as other interested.
Then our digital nerd Heidi Svane took over. She took a virtual temperature on how the digital development seem today, which many Danish furniture companies are comfortable with, but there are also those who lag behind the development.
“Being digital doesn’t mean putting an apprentice to do something about “the Facebook thing”. If you want something today, pure digital, you have to sacrifice time, resources and money to development your business into a digital direction. You can choose not to do anything digital, but for your own sake, you should be uncommonly sharp on everything that’s offline-based, said Heidi Svane, Lifestyle & Designcluster’s project manager for innovation and retail.
New channels
Annabel Kilner from the british MADE.com told about how they have achieved great success with crowdsource design, producing and delivering fast and not least exclusively sell through online channels. MADE.com have not yet made their entry on the Danish market, but they are strongly committed to the Scandinavian market and letting it to become their next extensive expansion of the exclusively online-based company’s huge product catalog.
Mette Rode from Lauritz.com told how she and Lauritz.com have evolved over recent years. From being a purely offline auction house for now to be massively present online, where 160,000 people daily frequents the site or their app. An important part of their strategy has been to create a community and building loyal followers. And it must be said to have succeeded for the company.
New markets
China has long been a dominant factor in the furniture market. First, primarily as a producer, but in recent years also as a purchaser of Danish furniture in different guises.
One of them is Danish FLEXA A/S, which sells children’s furniture. They entered China years ago and have since grown explosively.
“ The Chinese are buying entire rooms for their children. Nothing with a bed here, a table from IKEA, a chair from another brand- no, it’s all from the same provider. They just point to what they want, and then the room will look like this. We also work with virtual reality so buyers can quickly see how the selected furniture will look at home in their own apartment”.
New trends
Small Living not only means that one’s apartment or house is in the smaller department. It also means trying to exploit the unused space in the city, finding the hidden square meters, thinking cubic meters rather than square meters, and generally living in a different way than we have used to.
