Planet Money - Why you bought your couch

Episode Date: November 27, 2024

You probably own a chair or a table or a sofa. And you probably think you know why you bought it. Because it was comfy. Or blue. Or the right price. But what if the style, the color, the cost, maybe even whether you would like it, were choices made for you years before you even thought about buying that piece of furniture.Today on the show: The city that makes or breaks the furniture world. We travel to High Point, North Carolina and meet the people who make the bets – on whether or not you'll want that comfy blue couch.This episode was hosted by Amanda Aronczyk and Erika Beras. It was produced by James Sneed with help from Willa Rubin. It was edited by Jess Jiang, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Cena Loffredo. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.Help support Planet Money and hear our bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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This is Planet Money from NPR. A few weeks ago, I was chatting with a woman named Kristen Hawkins at an awards gala in High Point, North Carolina. Is this a big night? So tonight we are celebrating... Celebrating because Kristen works at a company that is up for one of the evening's awards. Well I'm nervous for you. I know my fingers are crossed. We're excited. But you know what? It's an honor to be nominated. I know that's like cliche to say but it is, you know, the Pinnacle Awards so we're excited to be here.

There are a couple hundred people here all dressed up. Like bites are being served, is the Pinnacle Awards, so we're excited to be here. There are a couple hundred people here, all dressed up, like bites are being served, there's cocktails. The awards start, and I make my way to the front, manage to grab a seat. There are introductions, and then a series of presenters take the stage. Lori, we need to speak loudly so people can hear.

Finally, the real stars of the evening start to appear on a screen behind the presenters. When you and I were chosen for this category, we were so excited because we really enjoy sitting. And that's why we're giving the award. And it looks like you share the same enthusiasm. You heard right. The presenters really enjoy sitting. This is the Oscars of Furniture, an entire evening of the latest standout furniture and home furnishings,

categories like home office and outdoor. This award category is for the best leather upholstery. The lucky nominees are a wood and leather armchair, a kind of boxy looking leather chair, and a swivel chair in new buck cognac, which I think is a leather and a color and a drink for that matter. And the winner is the wood leather chair

designed by Bernhard Alport, the design team for Bernhard Furniture. The winner is the Wood and Leather Armchair. The judges are design experts and they declared this chair a winner because it's, quote, strongly modern with a nod to traditional elements, a standout piece in any setting. Excellent job, Bowie Leather Chair. Other big winners tonight?

A 77-inch pendant light, a stylish recliner, and in the entertainment furniture category, a black and tan credenza took the prize. These are some of the finest high-end pieces of furniture from this past year. That brings us to the end of this year's Pinnacle Awards presentation. And while these are all very stylish items, this evening isn't just about celebrating this year's winners. It's also about the future of furniture. Because we're at High Point Market, the trendsetting event for furniture.

The people who come here decide what furniture makers will make over the next few years and what consumers will want to buy. Thank you for coming out. This is where trends in furniture are born. Hello, and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Amanda Oranchik. And I'm Erika Barris. You probably own a chair or a table or a sofa,

and you probably think you know why you bought it, because it was comfy or blue or the right price. But what if the style, the color, the cost, maybe even whether you would like it? Were choices made for you years before you even thought about buying that piece of furniture? Today on the show, the city that makes or breaks the furniture world. We travel to High Point, North Carolina and meet the people who make the bets on whether

or not you'll want that comfy blue couch. This message comes from Wyse, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend or receive money internationally and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the Wyse app today or visit wyse.com, T's and C's apply. If you're the kind of person whose idea of a good party conversation starts with I heard it on NPR, it might be time to take your super fandom seriously. Deck yourself out in style. NPR swag, from t-shirts to ball caps to the almighty NPR tote, are all at 25% off through

December 1st at shop.npr.org. Hey there, it's Tamara Keith from the NPR Politics Podcast, and I will keep this quick. Giving Tuesday is almost here, the perfect time to support the independent news source you rely on to stay informed. Please give today at donate.npr.org. And thank you. There is this scene from the movie The Devil Wears Prada. Maybe you remember it.

Meryl Streep is playing the role of a fashion icon and trendsetter. And she is berating Anne Hathaway, who is dismissive of the fashion industry, dismissive of what she sees as a small difference in style. Meryl Streep looks at her and her cerulean blue sweater, and she's basically like, you don't get it. That blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs. And it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when in fact,

you're wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. This room where the furniture industry makes the decisions that ripple out into showrooms and catalogs and eventually into our homes is actually more of a small city. We are in downtown High Point. So a little background, North Carolina and this region

have been making furniture for over 100 years. But when a lot of furniture manufacturing left for Asia, High Point decided to focus on what was left. The marketing, branding, styling, staging, the fashion of furniture. And today there are about 13 city blocks filled with properties, many of which have been converted into showrooms.

This is what makes up High Point Market. This is like Disney World for furniture. Our guide at High Point is Jay Anna Mize. Now Jay is not exactly the Meryl Streep of the industry. She says those are some pretty big lube-itons to fill. But she's not, not Meryl Streep. She's a VP at a company called Fashion Snoops that specializes in trend forecasting. And she's been in the furniture industry for years and seems to know everyone here.

Are you having fun? Always. Yeah, of course. No, I mean, you get to come and look at design and be with all of your friends. There's a lot of like 9 a.m. mimosas. Oh yeah, this is a hospitality industry and you're in the South. So everybody wants to feed you, water you,

I guess people buy more that way. We're in a massive glass and metal building, picture a new mall with each store filled with lighting or bedding or textiles or furniture. We head up to the third floor. We are on our way to Hooker Furniture. It is a hundred-year-old company and probably one of the giants, I would say. Hooker furnishings? Yes, we know.

Anyway, it's one of the largest and oldest furniture manufacturers in the country. Today has arranged for us to meet a friend and client of hers named Caroline Hipple. Caroline is a big deal in this industry, just won an icon award a few nights earlier. She's the chief creative officer for Hooker furnishings. Hi, how are you? I'm good, how are you? Let me have a hug first. Look how beautiful you look. Full disclosure, Caroline was not talking to me. She's talking to Jay, who's wearing this fabulous deep plum coat. Then Caroline turns to me. Hi, and you do too.

Oh, thank you so much. Caroline, along with hundreds of people, have spent the past few months designing and displaying furniture in this enormous space. They have set up one city block worth of sofas, side tables, lighting fixtures, all carefully staged together in vignettes. Now, the buyers here are not regular shoppers. There's no one buying a bedroom set for their home. High Point is a business-to-business market.

The sellers are furniture manufacturers. Companies like Hooker furnishings. They are here selling their latest designs. The buyers include interior designers, but more importantly, the big spenders are reps from the retail stores. Think Crate and Barrel, Restoration Hardware, Wayfair. Most of those big chains do not, in fact, have their own factories. So twice a year, High Point puts on this big market, and the Crate and Barrels of the World

come here to buy the furniture they want to sell in their stores. You'll see in our showroom, we study color and mood. Caroline takes us through a tour of the different vignettes. To model their latest dining room sets or their outdoor furniture, the rooms are set up with showroom samples. Here we have the lakeside version, you know, mountain homes, lake homes. And here you're seeing the moss greens and the earthy tones. There's a lot of furniture and so many rooms.

And now we've just walked into a new collection for us this season called Westwood. We've just left the lake and come to, you know, midtown Manhattan glam. She's hoping that all the retailers who are milling through these vignettes, that they will see the glamorous bed or the moss green chairs, and that they will like it and order them for their stores. This is the point of the week at High Point Market. For a long time, decisions about what furniture a company would make would be driven by,

well, what do they know how to make? Like, do they make hardwood tables and chairs? Then they'll make that. But now with the internet, the market is more competitive. Consumers have more choice, so furniture makers are trying to figure out what consumers might want. And for that, Caroline and the furniture company hire trend forecasters like Jay and they ask, what do you think is the next big thing? Basically, together they make a series of bets about what the

consumer will want to buy. And to do this, Jay and her colleagues do a ton of consumer research. They're pulling data on retail stores. What are people buying? They're looking at social media. What are people searching for? And they're following a media tracker. What topics are people reading about? They pull all of this together and try to make sense of what the big cultural trends might be.

Then they make predictions on all sorts of things including styles and buying habits and colors. Those predictions help determine what Caroline and the furniture company decide to make. She explains this by bringing up an example, their color predictions. Caroline and Jay points out this one really dramatic color that they think is gonna go big. And what color would you say that is? Huckleberry. Yeah. Huckleberry. It could be aubergine, Merleau.

Architectural judges just came out with it called Beet. They call it Beet. There's a couch, some suede chairs, and some pillows in Huckleberry. Jay's plum coat? It's actually Huckleberry. This is the color of the season. Even my nails are kind of that color. And yes, if you're wondering, this is a somewhat vibes-based prediction model,

but as I'm looking around, seeing this color everywhere, I don't know, I kind of like it. So wait, so did I want that color? You will want that color. I do now! I know! That's perfect! Yeah, exactly.

That's how working with someone like Fashion Sticks helps us. Amanda, you're so easy. It's too much. I know. I'm not ashamed. Huckleberry is such a pushover. I guess Caroline was also into it. Because of Jay's predictions, Caroline and Hooker Furnishings have made a bunch of furniture

in Huckleberry, as well as dusty terracotta, like those orange pots for plants, and a brassy mustard. So how did they get to these predictions? You think about what's going on in the economics of the world, what's going on in the environment that affects how the consumer feels. And then you'll see that translated into the choices they make to furnish their home. Jay says that during uncertain times and times of social upheaval, people are drawn to grounding colors, darker colors.

Yes, so I said huckleberry a year and a half ago. So that's when the whole process really began. Caroline heard Jay's prediction about Huckleberry. They decided they were going to give it a try, but her company doesn't actually weave their own fabric. They have to buy that from other people. So about a year ago, Caroline went to find fabric in that color. So we then go to a fabric market where we look at 5,000 fabrics in four days.

It's an ongoing slog. Caroline and her team go, they pick out some fabrics they like, and of course they order some styles in huckleberry. That fabric is then used to upholster chairs and sofas and ottomans. This whole process from the initial prediction of huckleberry to the huckleberry sofa in the showroom,

it moves pretty slowly. It takes about a year. It's about a year. Now that the Huckleberry furniture is here, the big test for Caroline and Jay will the retailers order it this week at High Point. We will find out later how this all works out for them. The next bet that Caroline and Jay are making is one based on demographics.

Like who is buying nice furniture right now? The Millennials are the most important buying group in home furnishings because they are now in their early 40s. And so there are more of them than any other demographic population. Caroline wants to show us what they've designed for the Millennials. So we walk to another showroom. She says Millennials are buying homes, getting rid of their futons and that IKEA lounge chair that so many people own. It's like practically a stage of adulthood.

Now Millennials are spending real money on furniture. We have a collection called Archives, which is for the granny millennial, the neo-traditional, and it's lacquered blue walls. What did you, what kind of millennial? Granny millennial. What is that? That is the, the, the millennials that are interested in this neo-tradition, this nostalgia for antiques. Yes, granny millennennial or Grand Millennial

appears to have been named a few years ago. Think millennials who are into things their grandparents might have owned, but make it more fun, like wildly floral wallpaper or a needlepoint pillow that says, Slay all day. Do it for the gram. You know, matchy-matchy is not what the neo-traditional millennial wants. They want items that evoke a feeling of the past, but make it modern.

So for the Grady millennial, Caroline has made a bed with a big tufted headboard and a leather desk chair and a walnut veneer table. She points out the table and it looks like my dining table which I inherited from my actual grandmother. The third and final bet that Caroline walks us through, a bet that people would also like a little whimsy, like a winged back chair with butterflies printed on the fabric. There is a thing about botanicals and insects right now. There's a nature thing, but not everybody will use that butterfly because it's a

little whimsical, but we like a little surprise and delight in our mix, you know, because it's not boring, you know, basically it's fun. It's just all light, neutral. Yeah, but it's not the way to uplift the soul in my opinion So After high point market ended we wanted to know did anyone buy what Caroline and Jay were selling Were retailers like the crate and barrels of the world putting in orders to buy some of this furniture like the Crate and Barrels of the World, putting in orders to buy some of this furniture.

So we did this. We predicted which rooms and things that they would like, and then we'll have a postmortem Wednesday about it. You know, what did we think was gonna happen, what did happen, what do we need to change, and how do we tweak our color palette for next season and next season. So, did Caroline and Jay's predictions on Huckleberry, Granny Millennial, and butterflies come true?

Will these trends be in stores near you soon? That is after the break. If you want to understand the dream scenario for furniture sellers like Hooker Furnishings, an example of why they want to be ahead of the trends and why they rely on predictions from forecasters like Jay, it's useful to look at this one pretty famous piece of furniture, the cloud couch. The initial concept was to come up with the ultimate sofa. So we sat down as a team and said, what is the ultimate sofa?

But it had to look beautiful because everything we do has to look visually strong. And it had to sit like a cloud. The voice in this ad is the sofa's designer, Timothy Olten. He designed the couch for RH, which most people know as Restoration Hardware. It was launched back in 2015. Now, if you don't know this couch, allow us to describe it. It looks like a big white fluffy cloud. It's plush, it's billowy, it's a sectional.

The cloud couch has been so successful. It made all of these enormous ripples through the furniture industry. Caroline describes it as the couch that ate the world. Jay says there are both cultural and practical reasons why this couch blew up. First, the cultural one. Jay says the couch represents the breakdown

between church and state. Church being the formal living room where you were forbidden to sit, versus the state, which is the den where you would actually lie around with your friends, eat snacks. The cloud couch is the peak of this massive cultural change from formal to relaxed. Think soft baggy pants and fast casual dining, but a couch. And especially during the pandemic, everyone wanted a lot of casual comfort. Then also because of the pandemic, there was a practical reason the couch did so well. The cloud couch blew up because of convenience.

And it was very popular in COVID because it was one of the only products that was available. Why? Because you couldn't get anything in and out of China. You couldn't get anything in and out of Vietnam. And the way the restoration hardware works is they are stacked warehouses. So that means that they had it on hand. They had it on hand. No kidding.

They're one of the only retailers that did. And so it's been a big driver for a lot of their success is their convenience model of being able to like really do what they call quick show. When I asked a lot of people at High Point about this couch they did not want to talk about it. Jay every time I say cloud couch to someone they're really like about it. Why? I think, listen, I think because fundamentally this is a market of aesthetics and we know what's what's actually good. And I hate to say this on record, but I will. It's a really crappy piece of furniture.

There are many, many TikToks and comments on Reddit dedicated to complaining about the clout couch. Mostly about how the pillows need to be floofed up every day, or otherwise it looks like a disaster, or how there's no support. It feels like you're just lying on a pile of blankets. We reached out to Restoration Hardware, but they didn't comment on customer complaints

or the alleged floofing issue. But even with the backlash, Restoration Hardware's slouchy, low, extra soft cloud couch became a hit. Now, for a while, they were the only ones selling their couch. But once it was a hit, many manufacturers made dupes. The way one executive described it to me, furniture is a knockoff industry. And retailers at all sorts of price points, from West Elm to Raymore and Flanagan to Wayfair,

came to High Point, where they might buy knockoffs of that couch. Some might cut corners on quality. This is how high fashion furniture moves through the industry and gets less expensive. Caroline Hippel from Hooker Furnishings says they have a couch inspired by the cloud couch too. She says it's very hard to copyright a sofa or an ottoman.

A company can patent something more technical, like the mechanism in a sofa that's got a pull-out bed, but trademarking a slouchy sectional is futile. Of course, her company would rather be a company that leads, you know, makes the trendsetting furniture that gets copied, not be the kind of company that just makes dupes. Standing in the hooker furnishings showroom, I point out a random chair to Caroline.

What would happen if you went across market and you saw that chair somewhere else? Like literally they would- I would be fussy, but then I would say flattery is a compliment and we do it better. Really seriously, that happens all the time. I'm like, oh dear God. But by the time they floor the copy,

you're onto the next. This knockoff culture is why many furniture makers have to keep trying to come up with the next cloud couch, minus the problematic pillows. So how did their bets on Granny Millennial, Huckleberry and Butterflies work out? Two weeks after the end of market, we called Caroline to see what trends worked and which did not. What would you say your biggest bets were at High Point this season?

Well, we've been studying what the millennial is interested in. Caroline starts by talking about the collection they've designed for the granny millennial. Now, success would look like getting a lot of orders, so many that they could even start making, or as they call it in the biz, cutting the furniture. Caroline says the orders are still coming in,

but her early read on the collection for Granny Millennials is very good. We felt so positively about this collection that we cut it actually and have inventory for it already. And that's a real sign of confidence. Right. Cut it like meaning they cut the wood. They had their factories in Vietnam start making this furniture.

Then we talk about their bet on colors. The dusty terracotta seemed to be the biggest draw. Do you think terracotta might have beat out my favorite huckleberry? I think maybe so, but don't count huckleberry out. Sometimes color is marketing. You use it to attract attention. But what we find is that usually for some of the newer colors popping into our world, it takes a couple of seasons for them to really gain

traction and people to figure out how they can use it. Yeah, Huckleberry hasn't taken off yet. And finally, for their last bet. How did Butterfly Print do? Very well, very, very well. We did it in a terracotta and a mustard and both placed very well. Mostly in pillows, I will say, and chairs. As for a huge viral trend piece, the next cloud couch, Caroline says that it is too

soon to say. She'll spend the next few weeks sorting out exactly what happened at this market. We do all of our research, but until you see the whites of the orders eyes, you're not ever sure. So it's always just a happy surprise for me. I never count my chickens until the orders are in. And she's already getting ready for the next market in spring 2025. James Sneed produced today's episode with help from Willa Rubin. It was edited by Jess Jang, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Sina Lofredo.

Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. Thanks this week to John Joe Schlichtman, who introduced me to High Point with his book, Showroom City. Thanks also to Tammy Covington, Erica Cross, Ben Muller, Neil Saunders, Steve Wilcox, and the teams at GJ Styles, Teresilla, Universal Furniture, Varelin, and Forehands.

I'm Amanda Oranchik. And I'm Erica Barris. This And I'm Erika Barris. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. NPR is always cooking, no cap. So when I say Giving Tuesday is coming, I think you understand the assignment. Please donate today. Make your gift at donate.npr.org. Thanks, Bestie. Take a moment to unwind and give thanks this week with NPR's All Songs Considered,

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