Free Newsletter
It’s High Point Market week, and before the market officially opens on Saturday there will be plenty of talk about traffic. How much of it came early? Who was in town on Monday? Tuesday? Are all the majors here? Who’s not coming? Do you think it will pick up?
Then, of course, the unofficial measurements begin. How long are the elevator lines? Do the halls seem crowded? What’s the parking situation? Foot traffic on the streets?
That will be followed by rationalizations: “it’s not the quantity it’s the quality” (I agree with this one actually) and “We saw the people we needed to see.” We’ve all heard and likely said these things or something like it at one point or another.
For the latest High Point Market news, click here to visit our Live From Market landing page.
The simple truth is there are fewer retailers today than there were 10 years ago, even fewer than there were 20 years ago and quite a lot fewer than there were 30 years ago. That’s why around 60% of the registered attendees at the Market this week will be interior designers. That channel remains highly fragmented and will continue to account for a high proportion of registrations and foot traffic.
But there’s a more relevant concern this week than traffic.
It’s open-to-buy.
Every retailer in the world could fly into High Point this week (we can all wish), but if they don’t have dollars allocated for new goods, their presence would mean little. After nearly two years of soft sales and lower foot traffic, retail inventories remain higher than most market exhibitors would like heading into a critical selling season.
I’ve spoken with several retailers in recent weeks, and the consensus is that retail open-to-buy, like consumers discretionary spending, is constrained. Despite many exhibitors coming to market with their “largest-ever” slates of new products, the likelihood is that much of what is new will not make it to retail floors. That’s not a function of traffic, but of inventory levels, consumer demand and the higher cost of borrowing.
In this environment, the traditional method of evaluating market success by counting the number of companies that get scanned into the showroom is unlikely to be an effective measure of actual market productivity.
Instead, it might prove more instructional to measure the number of “new” accounts that walk through the door. This number might help companies better understand the potential for market share growth and where that growth is coming from. Or perhaps a measure of new slots gained on existing floors or new accounts opened could prove effective, at least given the difficulty of finding a normal timeframe against which to measure comparative results these days.
Whatever the measure, discussions of “traffic” at markets are not the benchmark they once were. The real measure of success this market will be who can capture their share (and maybe someone else’s) of what is certain to be a smaller pool of open-to-buy dollars.
See you ‘round the market.
