Remember Crazy Eddie?

Back in the ’80s, the New York-based consumer electronics chain was known for its loudmouthed spokesperson, presumably Crazy Eddie himself. In ubiquitous television and radio ads, Eddie would proclaim at the top of his lungs that his prices were “insaaaaaaane!”

One of the happiest discoveries I made during last month’s New York Home Fashions Market was when I visited 295 Fifth Ave., the long-time textiles showroom building.

Over the past two years, hallways have been repainted, marble cleaned and polished, lights replaced and directory signs replaced. A state-of-the-art security system was installed. Work has also been taking place on the building’s exterior, where the engraving has been spruced up with gold paint and planters put in place.

A national magazine photographs a celebrity in her kitchen with your iconic knife block prominently displayed on her countertop.  You post a link to the article on your Facebook page. 
While shopping in New York City, a celebrity tweets “Love [BRAND’s] new [PRODUCT] design!  Everyone grab one—they won’t last long!”  You retweet.

As the home furnishings industry convenes for its annual gathering at McCormick Place, it’s interesting to note that U.S. consumers are in the midst of a rare housewares moment.

Fizz-maker SodaStream created a housewares buzz amongst consumers with a much-seen ad during the recent Super Bowl. The Israeli-based company undoubtedly will have one of the busiest booths at this year’s International Home + Housewares Show.

Walmart’s goal of increasing its purchases of U.S.-made goods could be one of the biggest wake-up calls to the home industry in decades.

At the recent National Retail Federation’s Big Show, Bill Simon, head of Walmart U.S., said both Walmart and Sam’s Club plan to buy $50 billion more in U.S.-manufactured products by 2023. Part of this commitment involves helping manufacturers create U.S. production in home furnishings, particularly textiles, furniture and high-end appliances.

To zero in like this on the home industry is particularly significant.

Even if you’re more apt to foresee fiscal cliffs than resolutions comprised of wishful thinking, the new year is a time for optimism and renewal.

Most of the most recent retail sales reports, along with early holiday sales tallies give good reason to be hopeful.

The impact of Hurricane Sandy on the East Coast didn’t prevent retailers from finishing nearly 4 percent ahead of last year’s November sales, according to the National Retail Federation. Home furnishings store sales were up nearly 6.2 percent over last year.

I’m not particularly trendy.

Sure, there was that time back in the ’90s when I saw an unknown rock band that later hit the big time. But that was decades ago, before gray hair, children and the suburbs.

That’s why I’m shocked to find myself currently on the cutting edge of popular culture. So what is it that’s qualifying me for glorified hip status? One word: chickens.

Retailers have made so much news this summer that it makes one wonder if store executives ever take a vacation. Say goodbye to the idea that not much happens during the summer months.

Maybe all of the activity is because retailers are staying primed and ready as they prepare for an about-to-happen boom in consumer spending. Or perhaps the retail environment has become so competitive that it doesn’t allow for time off. For whatever reason, retailers seemed to have worked through what should have been their summer vacation.

Color is risky business in the gray/beige home furnishings world, but the summer trade shows prove that some companies are taking a gamble.

Dallas Market Center and AmericasMart in Atlanta were both flush with bold color schemes and if previews are any indication, Las Vegas will continue the trend.

Trend watchers and forecasters say that consumers’ moods often can be evaluated based on their taste for color. Optimistic consumers, they say, like to surround themselves with bright hues. Consumers who are hunkering down from the onslaught of a bad economy will opt for grays.

The news of Michael Francis’ sudden departure from J.C. Penney shows that the worries over the retailer’s new strategies have spread to its corporate headquarters.

There was some reason to expect that the Walmart shareholders meeting last Friday would be a somber, or even contentious, affair, in light of the bribery scandal involving the retailer’s Mexican operation.

By David Gill

The signs are all in place that Amazon.com may soon supplant Walmart as America’s most powerful retailer—if it hasn’t already.

Ever since J.C. Penney’s new CEO, Ron Johnson, announced his new strategies for reviving its business in January, those who follow the department store have suffered many cases of the jitters.

The latest fit of nerves occurred last week, when online news reports yelped that J.C. Penney said its new pricing and the reformatting its stores around shop concepts “could hurt sales for some time,” and there was no guarantee that its strategies would work.

I have attended a number of presentations to financial analysts over my years as a reporter. Last week, for the first time, I went to one which was haunted.

The news earlier this month that Martha Stewart is taking her wares to J.C. Penney is worthy of a cover story for Star magazine.

Not surprisingly, tongues are wagging.

Home furnishings is all abuzz about Martha’s proposed ménage à trois: J.C. Penney has clearly wooed Martha successfully, yet she’s hoping to continue her relationship with longtime partner Macy’s. Will Macy’s play along? Or will CEO Terry Lundgren declare a divorce from the domestic doyenne because she’s headin’ for the cheatin’ side of town?

Retail’s biggest weekend of the year has come and gone, and here are a few takes from what occurred during the 2011 turkey-fed frenzy:

1. The Thanksgiving weekend has become so special to retailers that every one of those days has a name. We now have Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday (and Sleep It Off Sunday...my thanks to my colleague, Andrea Lillo, for that one).

What’s the deal with kids these days? Whatever it is, it is playing havoc on the home furnishings industry at a level not seen in decades, if ever.

It’s nothing new to say that to succeed in business, a company needs to change with the times.

But it seems that the rate of change today is so head-spinningly fast, it’s nearly impossible to keep up.

The current state of metamorphosis occurred to me last month when I read “20/20: Vision for the Future” from the International Furnishings and Design Association. The report is drawn from a survey of nearly 2,000 IFDA members across the United States and abroad and it forecasts how Americans will live in the year 2020.

Mouth-watering smells of Spanish-influenced food filled the kitchen theater as chef Hector Santiago  prepared a rice dish. Complete with luscious-looking, lime-colored fava beans, the spicy meal could be viewed bigger than life on large screens throughout the demonstration area.

Audience members, along with an emcee, asked the chef questions during his segment. Did he blanch the fava beans before adding them to the rice? Why, yes he did.

Ultimately, the audience was allowed to sample the dish—it was delicious, everybody was happy, another successful gourmet segment.

Remember the old saying, “Go west young man”?

Perhaps that impression should be altered to “go east,” as far east as you can get. In other words, head to China and take advantage of the nation’s rapidly expanding consumer market.

I was an eyewitness to the voracity and power of the Chinese consumer in April, when I attended the Hong Kong Houseware Fair. New York may be called the “city that never sleeps,” but Hong Kong really earns that moniker--its citizens don’t sleep because they’re too busy shopping.

There are simply no more excuses for the industry not to step it up a bit.

For at least two years, many retailers and suppliers in the home furnishings industry lamented the fact that the recession forced them to hold the line on spending, which limited product introductions and new merchandising programs. The result has been a form of stagnation that has contributed to the industry’s downturn.

Over the last month or so, home furnishings industry members have crisscrossed the country flying to trade shows in Atlanta, Dallas, Las Vegas and New York. Travelers looking out their plane windows saw a mostly frozen, snowed-over continent, then were greeted with colder-than-usual weather at their destinations.

Despite the record-breaking chilly weather, most of the vendors at these shows confidently proclaimed that things seemed to be heating up--with their business, that is.

Big spending has been a part of the Vegas lifestyle for decades, and now the conspicuous consumer can pick something up at Droog, the new U.S. location of the Dutch design company.

Facing the Las Vegas Strip in The Cosmopolitan hotel, the 2,500-square-foot shop is Droog’s only U.S. store. Droog closed its SoHo store last year and is looking for a new spot in New York.

Last month was full of “do you remember?” events.

Do you remember when John Lennon was killed? Or perhaps you remember when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Has it really been six years since the giant tsunami killed nearly a quarter of a million people in Asia?

Here’s to hoping that 2011 will be remembered for a substantial economic recovery—and a return to normalcy for home furnishings sales.

Now that Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Twofer Tuesday (I made that one up) are behind us, the industry can focus on more important things—like this riddle: How does a house expand when it’s getting smaller?
Recent statistics show that the average, new American home is shrinking, specifically with fewer bedrooms and bathrooms. Makes sense, considering the economy. Smaller homes require less energy, allowing the owner to save money and be more green. Plus, there aren’t as many McMansions being built as even well-off consumers are living with less.

There have been three great seminal changes in the history of retailing. That is about to become four.

The first was the creation of the modern American department store. John Wanamaker, Marshall Field and their contemporaries built huge retail emporiums that to this day are the top of the food chain when it comes to consumer products, particularly fashion goods.

It’s the start of the fourth quarter, coach: Do you know where your customers are?
To the old Ben Franklin adage about the only things certain in life being death and taxes, we can now add a third: Really bad economic predictions.
For the past 36 months we have been subjected to an endless array of forecasts, prognostications and outright guesses on what was going to happen to business conditions going forward.
And they’ve all pretty much been wrong.
It’s like the old Louis Prima song lyrics:
    “First you say you do and then you don’t.

To most people in the home business, China is either too close or too far with very little in between.

Too close to the people who go to China so often on sourcing trips that they become oblivious to the fact that they are in a very different country, one totally apart from the one they live in. They might as well be visiting the Carolinas or Houston.

And too far to those who have never been to China and only have anecdotal stories from others or the media on which to base their impressions. China might as well be on Pluto.

Ditch the Dow. Have no confidence in Consumer Confidence. And cop out when it comes to comp store sales.

If you want to know how’s business, all you need to understand is the Wal-Get Ratio. It’s so simple even somebody in the home furnishings business can figure it out.

First look at Walmart’s business. Is it very OK, just OK, not so OK or very not OK? Then do the same thing for Target.  Compare the two findings and you have the Wal-Get Ratio: Walmart doing better, times are tougher; Target doing better, times are improving.

The ’em in this case refers to those dastardly guys who were going to destroy retailing as we knew it: e-commerce.

Remember back in the late 1990s when every forecaster worth his Blackberry and Brooks Brothers suit predicted that the Internet was going to kill conventional retailing, taking 30, 40, 50 percent market share, creating new retail powerhouses, putting gazillions of stores out of business and changing everything forever?

Beth Lang

What is business excellence?

I asked myself that same question when I was presented with the opportunity to be this month’s guest columnist.

By definition, excellence is the “fact or state of excelling.” OK, so excelling in what—everything? Strategy, marketing, finance, technology and those sorts of things? That seems very broad. I think the answer is a little more simplistic—business excellence is having a great, not good, business.

The following are a few observations I’ve made over the years for what constitutes a GREAT business:

I sure hope Target and Walmart sell boxing gloves because they are going to need them now.

These two megamonster retailers usually co-exist just fine and are not generally known for taking shots at each other. Each has pretty much staked out its positioning and when one tries to intrude upon the other’s it usually doesn’t work out so well.

So an ad that Target ran this past Sunday—I saw it in “The New York Times,” but presumably it ran elsewhere—is that much more extraordinary.
The headline on the ad is: “Expect more than just a low price.”

How long does it take to build up a brand? Years, sometimes 30 or 40 years to really make it stick. How long does it take to tear one down? About the time it should take to stop a Toyota going 60-miles-per-hour ... around 60 seconds.

How Toyota comes out of this safety—not to mention public relations—nightmare remains to be seen. It took Audi 20 years to recover from its unintended acceleration problems ... and that turned out not to even be the car’s fault.

So, the latest retail rocket science theory is to start condensing assortments around key brands, eliminating others and consolidating ordering from fewer suppliers.

This gives the store more buying power as its orders get larger as well as making it easier for retail operations and stocking departments to do their jobs. It may even allow the store to offer an exclusive brand not available elsewhere.

Don’t look now, but the pendulum is starting to swing back the other way.
No, some company at the Housewares Show this week is not introducing an automatic pendulum slicing machine  ... although that’s actually not such a bad idea.
The pendulum we’re talking about is the symbolic one, the one that seems to chart the relative health of the economy.

This has not been a funny year. There has not been much to laugh about for the millions of people out of work, for those who have watched their personal financial situations deteriorate and for all the companies struggling to survive the worst economic period in several lifetimes. So, in this annual ritual of suggesting special presents for special people in the business, it wouldn’t be wrong to wish everyone a better 2010 and be done with it. In fact, I’ll go on record as doing so right here and now.

By Jill Sands

The image of the Christmas shopping season of 2009 that will forever stick in my brain: a woman being interviewed on a local TV news show on December 26. Shown at a mall with a shopping bag or two, she is asked why she is out there on the day after Christmas: “You have to go shopping. You have to go to the sales.” Say whatever you want about all of us cutting back on our shopping, buying less for ourselves and others. Tell us that people have changed, that we’re not consumed with consuming the way we used to be.

The demise of the modern American department store has been written about ad nauseam for years and years. And yet go into any big mall in the country, walk to one end and there sits a department store, as large and shiny as it ever was, defying the predictions of the best suits in the business. But with even Dubai threatening to sink into the desert, we’ve all learned that anything can happen and it can happen anytime. So, perhaps it’s time to visit once again the subject of the future of department stores, especially this month when so many of them are counting on so much.

By Bert Shlensky
We all acknowledge the changes in the economy and that individuals and organizations have made significant cost reductions and dramatically lowered growth expectations. However, this has ignored some of the fundamental structural realities and requirements:
• We have ignored the proliferation of unnecessary products, the consumer’s perception that the stuff is overpriced and a return to basics.