To Market, to Market…..

I got talked into attending the furniture market with my family in Las Vegas last week for the Las Vegas Market Expo.  I used to enjoy the market—I’d go from showroom to showroom, getting ideas for decorating my own home and—oh, yes—looking for manufacturers whose lineup might work well in our store.  Sometimes we’d go as a family, a few times I went alone.

Then there was the year my father decided to accompany me, and asked all of our manufacturers if they offered a senior discount.  It was somewhat embarrassing, but it was fun to be with my dad, and everyone loved his quirkiness, so I got over it.

The West Coast market was held for many years in San Francisco, a city I love, but in 2005 it moved to Las Vegas, a city I just barely tolerate.

So, I haven’t attended a furniture market in a decade—but this was a chance to catch up with my sons Jacques and Max, who live in Los Angeles, and who were attending this year.

As I’m not part of the buying team, I assigned myself the task of reporting on the market to the Sleepers In Seattle blog readers.

What it is:  Three enormous buildings.  16 stories each.  Full of furniture and home decor.  Plus, three pavilions with more stuff for sale.  In the “Mattress and Bedding” category alone there were 208 exhibitors.   Under “Upholstered Furniture” there are 302 dealers listed.  It’s impossible to see everything.  You have to have a game plan.  Which will include working on your inner peace skills, as there is an interminable wait for an elevator or a long slog up a series of escalators—the type that end in one spot and involve a hike to the one for the next level.

So I decided to attend a seminar on the ground floor: “Spotting New Trends in Home Decor.”  Did you know that Pantone’s 2018 Color of the Year is Ultra Violet?  Asian art is always popular? Portraiture, especially the Dutch Masters, is big right now?  Black backgrounds are making a comeback?  Grey has moved from fashionable to basic?  I endured this class to bring you these hot tips.  None of which are particularly relevant to the sleeper sofa business.

I also did my own research at the furniture market and came up with a few more trends that we will probably not be showcasing at Sleepers In Seattle, but that were interesting nonetheless:

Large Animals as accessories

The Mosquito Net look

Glittery Tinsel as table decor

Fluffy Fake Fur on an endless variety of small items

Burgundy oak wine barrel furniture

Giant Acrylic People sculptures

Then I decided to focus on what was really important.  The swag.  I did some in-depth research into what free items were offered by the showrooms.  Personalized shopping bags were all the rage.  As I live in a city that has made free shopping bags illegal, I snapped up as many bags as I could haul around the market, feeling like a law-breaker.  I found complimentary notepads, pens, lanyards and branded sticky notes.  Water bottles with fragments of some new mattress material attached, for a vaguely icky feeling.  Free food—although one of my preferred obsessions is worrying about who might have sneezed on the buffet, so I observed rather than indulged.

My favorite freebie of the furniture market was a chamomile-scented travel pillow I scored just for listening to a presentation on scented memory foam bedding.  Obviously, time well-spent.

At lunch, I conferred with the buying team and they let me know that they had just ordered an amazing new product:  a sleeper sofa that opens up into a bunk bed from Luonto Furniture.  Exciting news!

I dashed over to the Luonto showroom, and when I say dashed, I mean I waited so long for an elevator that I made three new lifelong friends in the crowd.

At the Luonto showroom, I was greeted by Ville, the sales manager for North America, who looked at my name tag and asked, “are you Max’s sister?”  I looked at Ville and let him know that of course I was, and that he could double whatever order my family had just placed.

Here are Ville and Gary showing us how the sofa to bunk bed sleeper sofa mechanism works.  As Ville kicked it back into position, I, as a self-respecting mother of boys, expressed alarm at his seemingly casual attitude towards the furniture.  But he assured me it was very durable and if anything ever went wrong with the mechanism, the company would stand behind the warranty.

I resisted the urge to ask him if Luonto offered a senior discount.