Live blogging the Home and Housewares Show in Chicago, exhibitors have decidedly and overwhelmingly used color to offset these recessionary economic times.

The theory is manufacturers and retailers must give the consumer a reason to buy and color can immediately outdate a product and make it necessary to purchase on the basis of color.

Color has always been used, though generally cautiously by most housewares manufacturers and retailers, i.e., Target…Wal-Mart, but without question, color is now THE statement. Case in point is Whitmoor, above. They’ve taken an ordinary ironing board cover and used great eye popping colors to enhance its utility.

I can tell you I don’t need an ironing board cover, but this is an inexpensive (relatively speaking) purchase that is going to make me feel good. That dull green (that I purchased a few years back in hopes of updating my everyday routine) can now be replaced by a HAPPY COLOR.

Other show trends are focused on cooking (as a large percentage of consumers have decided fine dining is expendable); so celebrity chefs are here, and gourmet cooking utensils now rule.

Lauren Greenwood, my pr contact at the show, also pointed out when showing me through the media rooms selected products, that manufacturers have also responded to these recessionary times by creating products and offerings to enhance a new DIY sensibility…..where you may have farmed out the cleaning to a maid at one point in time, you are now doing it yourself and manufacturers are enhancing that everyday utilitarian product.

My favorite of these is ALICE Supply Co., a self described hip housewares company who is putting fun into home chores by using HAPPY COLORS and designs (stripes and camouflage) on plungers and hoses and dustpans and broom handles, oh my!

Maria Barnes and Raili Clasen are the brains behind ALICE Supply Co.. Friends since college, Maria and Raili both came out of the fashion industry having worked for Roxy and Quicksilver. Using those connections and those sources, ALICE Supply Co., now all of two months old, is bringing that same hip cool formula from the surfer world and making waves in a formerly staid part of the housewares industry. You can find their product currently at Fred Siegal in Los Angeles and Lisa Perry in New York. Their website is www.alicesupplyco.com but is in the process of being designed so is coming soon.

As to the GREEN category it’s still alive and well but it looks to have receded to some degree in importance (with the exception of water bottles which proliferate at this show) while manufacturers decide how best to define themselves in the green/sustainable environment. There is a focus on more durable long lasting product as opposed to throw-away disposable products. This in itself can be defined as part of the green movement. But I can tell, overall, the lingo of what is green and what is not or where a product falls on the GREEN SCALE (a term I’ve coined) is yet to be clarified.

In an effort to help not only the consumer but other manufacturers clarify their position on the sustainable movement, I’ll be using Aladdin and Eco Gen (I blogged about Eco Gen launched at last year’s housewares show) as the best of the best when it comes to walking the walk.
Check back soon for the details.

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This is a departure from where we have been but I’ve wanted to put these ads up for awhile. It’s part of a marketing campaign I did for a company who wanted to use their core product, poly vinyl coated wire shelving, to create storage for the scrapbooker.

This ad campaign was tremendously successful. The first shot in particular (top) brought customers into our booth at the trade shows in droves….not to mention people just being so excited about the product offering period. We positioned it as an affordable at home storage system with some on-the-go products as scrapbookers always take their projects to crop events which take place at venues outside their home so they have to have a way to transport these items to those places.

I had the product in both Hobby Lobby and A.C. Moore within six months of our beginning to ship and it hit the top ten list for the holiday season of products ordered at organize.com within that same first six months. What happened was that we got some significant space from a special edition of a Memory Makers Storage publication (on shelves for more than 3 months). Because it was still early in the game and we didn’t have a whole host of retailers set up around the country, I had the factory’s 800 number listed and we routed the customer to our online partners. So you know that story, “He who hesitates is lost,” and “the early bird catches the worm.” In that particular case, the early bird was Organize.com.

The adman on the project was Scott Schafer from Schafer Associates, here in St. Louis, and of course I highly recommend Scott. He was very quick at getting the point of the matter, offered more than one solution to our solution, and kept the thread running throughout (we had 3 different ads we ran within a year at various times according to other events we had scheduled).

In the words of Hannibal from the hit television series, The A Team, “I love it when a plan comes together.”

You can find out more about Scrapbook Solutions at their website, www.scrapbooksolutions.net. And to see a video about Scrapbook Solutions you can visit A.C. Moore’s scrapbook video section (I’m in the video too!). Besides seeing how our top two items work and how the system comes together, this video also highlights the packaging, which was also a significant boon to the product line’s success. When you see the video, you’ll see that our choice of colors and how we put them together along with the shots of the product and the company logo came together in a perfect harmony of color, clarity, and attention grabbing.

P.S. The parent company of Scrapbook Solutions is Industrial Wire Products, Inc. and I was the VP Sales & Marketing for the retail side of their business and was responsible for not only this product launch but also their core product line found in most storage and mass retailers around the country and online….

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LOL. You all must realize how much I like color by now. A fun topic, it’s changing like crazy of late, which gives me much to talk and therefore write about.

Alas, its time to move on from red. So, where shall we go? From images of Maison Objet 2008 and the ever so creative and innovative Campana Brothers, it’s a little bit of everything with heavier influences of pink and purples which is putting the reds into blues and popping it with greens and yellows.

Campana Brothers Sushi Chairs: (above left: Sushi IV Chair) (below Sushi II Chair)

Maison Objet 2008 (taken from NY Times article) and Dior Fall 2008 (Style.com):

Maison Objet 2008 (Image taken from 3 Layer Cake blog):

New York Gift Show 2008 (Pablo Pardo, images from Apartment Therapy):

NY 2007 Gift Show: John Pomp Glass

I want to talk more about the Campana Brothers, because those chairs are from 2003 and produced in limited editions. They’ve come out with some more recent stuff that I think will also have a waterfall effect in home design (next post). If you are wondering where to find the chairs featured here MossOnline, ExtremeMoss, carries them or you can go directly to the Campana Brothers website.

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Webkinz. As Alison Zisko reported 2.11.08 for trade journal Home Furnishings News, “For the uninitiated, Webkinz, manufactured by Ganz, are small plush toys that come with a secret code that unlocks a secure Web site, enabling children to take care of a virtual pet online. It offers games, trivia questions and all sorts of ways for children to mind the health and well being of their pet, as well as create and decorate rooms for it on the computer. Webkinz are introduced periodically. Introduced in April 2005, they retail for around $12.95 apiece.”

The article further states ,”“We sold almost half a million dollars in Webkinz last year,” said David Calcaterra, vice president of Thrifty Florist, which operates 16 of the combined flower and gift shops in the metropolitan Detroit region. “People bought other things. In the month of December, it made a difference.”

So far what they are talking about is the selling of the stuffed animals, Webkinz, themselves. What about actual products that license them. Seems like a terrific boost to sales of anything i.e. bedding, tabletop items themselves, furniture, pajamas….lunchboxes, backbacks. It’s a thought, or more like a recommendation. I haven’t checked into licensing the product myself, not yet.

I will say that it is one of those things Moms are recommending to other Moms and is a topic of conversation between Moms….always a surefire way of seeing the beginnings of something very big.

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Mother Nature never loses her ability to inspire, be it the poet, the artist, the photographer, the designer…her wonders never cease.. So this next entry, certain to create buzz, comes with a double whammy: inspiring and useful.

This shelving system is quite literally based on the honeycomb as a design element. By Clive Wilkenson and introduced at the Milan Furniture Fair ‘07, you can find out more at their website, Quinzeandmilan.tv.

Here’s their description of the design:

“Honeycombs, one of the oldest architectural concepts known, inspired this design of a flexible shelving system. The individual units are made from rotation-molded thin walled polyethylene resulting in an exceptional transparency and rigidity. A straightforward riveting system allows for an efficient and reversible installation with unlimited and flexible compositions.
HONEYCOMB, which was developed together with Intelligent Design, ensures an enhanced structural capacity that allows stacking up to 7 meters in two directions and even allow the removal of units within a built wall to create ‘windows’. So keep your things in place, your peeping neighbors out or your friends in and make your own humming environment… Available in orange (honey), green (mint), red (cherry), light grey, white and black - or email us for custom colour requests.”

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I have a prediction for me for 2008 and that is that this is going to be a year of firsts; everything I am coming across of late just tops it all. This latest one is from Discovery News and I think I’ll be throwing many things out once this gets to market cause it solves just about all of my desktop organizational problems; Smart Quickie Notes Organize Themselves (and other uses for RFID tags): an official solution to the ubiquitous Post-It-Note.

Read On….

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I have a confession to make. I am a pile person…the sort of person who can magically pull that precise piece of paper from an unsuspecting pile and who, when all piles have been organized and filed, can’t find anything. Don’t ask me about this skill. It remains a mystery to me. And while I also confess to being pleased at how my work style still manages to pull everything together, I do ponder dreamily of the paperless office.

I would like for Bill Gates and his cohorts to approve of me.

So to that end, I have searched the globe and the internet tirelessly in hopes of finding the “perfect workspace,” “the perfect storage/file system.” I have even at one point tried a professional organizer with some success, and had a brief encounter with a pre Blackberry Palm Pilot. Then I took a stab at creating my own calender system having been an avid student of the Franklin Planner System, then the Franklin Covey Planner System, and now the At-A-Glance Quick Notes Planner (I still need the written word). It is a subject of great pride for me that I got my daughter started on a planner system when she was in middle school.
Professionally I work with several companies on creating storage and organizational products for home, home office, office and back to school (including dorm storage).

So as you see, I am a passionate consumer as well as creator of storage and organizational products and things….that said, I do believe I have found the perfect workspace and organizational system to, alas, put to rest the anxiety of this self proclaimed clutterphile and become, ahhhh, organized. Here is my perfect officespace, compliments of Ikea. What’s yours?

If you need a little help, check out Ikea’s Small business guide. It helps you organize your thoughts by getting you to understand want you wnat to achieve out of your space, then you can build it out from there, all online. And their tips and recommendations for workspace stations helps to direct your focus. In fact exploring Ikea’s Workspace Solutions in general is like chicken soup for the clutterphile’s soul, beginning with the small business solutions, making a pit stop at De-Clutter and Organize and then moving on to any other spaces you may want to organize with images of totally cool spaces and the product that fills them from every room of your home.

Let me know how it goes….maybe I should do a before and after myself since this is something I plan to get under control for 2008 and there’s no time like the present to get started.

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I’m having one of those moments in life when things get out of control. Too much to do to keep up with it all; I apologize for not posting for more than a few days. I’ve had several projects to get out and contracts to adhere to. The dog gets walked; groceries are purchased, occasionally and the rest has been put in piles.

So what I’ve discovered over the last few weeks is cooraboration on the checks, they’re in, maryam in marrakech is having all the fun (back from Egypt with bounty in hand), London is still besting New York and Italy when it comes to fashion (Paris is next week), and September is still my favorite time of year…September then October so it’s all good.

Next post? Office Storage. (and, that’s not me in the picture…but it feels like me…you know that feeling, yes?)

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