Describing a collection in a way that is compelling, evocative and clear can mean the difference - at least to those charged with doing it - between attracting an entirely new group of customers and repelling existing ones. Consumers these days "define themselves in different terms than the ones we use in the furniture industry," like traditional or contemporary, said Bruce Birnbach, the president of American Leather. "If we speak to them in our industry terms we're going to miss. You have to be very careful about putting the customer into a box."
Sometimes the high stakes can lead to a certain timidity. The marketing team at Century spent more than three months conducting focus groups, researching consumer data and combing thesauruses before introducing a collection that became available to consumers earlier this year, under the rather tame rubric "New Traditional."
"The words 'classic' and 'traditional' are emotionally charged words and mean different things for different people," Tashjian explained of the struggle. "Twenty to 30 percent of our customers say they want traditional furniture but they don't want their grandma's or their parent's look. They want it to be fresher and contemporized so that it's their own. They want it to have some kind of classic feel, but they want it to be slightly different."
Bernhardt Furniture Co, which in the past has focused on traditional furniture but has lately expanded its repertory, also took several months coming up with the name for a new collection that merges old and new, although its approach was somewhat more adventurous. "We were looking for lifestyle-type names that just kind of sounded young and fresh and updated," said Heather Eidenmiller, Bernhardt's director of brand development. "You've got to find a name that pulls them in but that would never turn them off," she added: "A name that can be pronounced, and that doesn't sound like influenza." (For a brief moment in 2006, the company considered naming its neo-traditional Wilshire Blvd line for the Pantages Theater in Hollywood, but "you could just hear people say 'Pantages is contagious,'" Eidenmiller said.)
For Tashjian of Century, today's mix of old and new is part of an ongoing tale. "This is what that whole neo-classic movement was all about," he said, "back around the time of Napoleon and that whole consulate era, when they wanted to go back to the Greeks and Romans and Ionic columns but they wanted to make it their own. One of the greatest paradoxes of this human condition we live in is people have these conflicting desires: first, to belong to a group, and second, to be unique. And these two things fight with each other and that happens with furnishings, too."
A few lucky souls like Adler find that the conflicting desires pose no marketing challenge at all. Recently he introduced several pieces from his Regent Collection (more are to arrive this year) that include baroque 18th century-style occasional tables that have been stripped of some ornamentation, lacquered white and given polished nickel feet. His name for this style? "I call it 'Neo-Neo-Classicism.' I could keep neo-ing but I think neo-neo- is a good expression of it."
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