Marks blog: The Delta Market

In physics, the delta symbol is used to represent a change or a difference in some quantity. So it is apt that the Covid-19 variant which has scrambled planning for the fall New York Home Fashions Market is the Delta.

You may recall that as recently as July, it looked as though there would be a fairly healthy contingent of retailers coming into the city for in-person showroom meetings. The Home Fashion Products Association assembled a list for internal planning purposes. I won’t identify the players, but collectively the “we’re definitely coming” retailers account for a few billion dollars in annual home textiles sales and the “we’re waiting to get an okay to travel” retailers account for another $1.5 billion or so.

There were three highly significant retailers in the “definitely not” column, one of which does not always attend during the actual market week. Still, it was a pretty encouraging tally, and some suppliers that are not based in New York began seriously thinking about flying in to set up their showrooms.

Enter the Delta. By early August it was spreading rapidly across the country, and “definitely coming” retailers and suppliers not based in the Tri-State area hit the pause button. By the time Labor Day rolled around, there were only two major out-of-town retailers still on the fence. The other big guns had resigned themselves to another PowerPoint/virtual reality/Zoom  market, and New York area suppliers who stuck to their plan to open up for visitors realized the crowd would mostly consist of locals.

And yet…

I’m finding there will be more open doors than I would have expected.  There will be boatloads of virtual meetings, of course, and they will once again stretch past the official market week dates.

Given the way things were looking in early September, I figured I would end up doing two days of in-person appointments and spend the rest of the week in virtual meetings. By mid-September, I was wondering whether two days might be overly optimistic. I’m now booked into Wednesday with in-person meetings.

There are a few certainties, however. Because this year’s fall market was always expected to be something of a hybrid, HTT will once again host a series of online events. The program kicks off Monday morning, Oct. 4, with JCPenney EVP/chief merchandising officer Michelle Wlazlo in an exclusive interview, and wraps late Tuesday afternoon, Oct. 5, with our Trailblazers & Titans awards ceremony and virtual cocktail party.

The program also includes panel discussions on M&A activity in the home goods market and trends in the better goods market.

All events are free of charge to those who register at www.hometextilesweek.com.

The only thing you can’t catch if you miss it live is the Trailblazers & Titans cocktail party on Zoom – which gives you a chance to mix with this year’s honorees (Big Lots, Casper, Trident and Pegasus Home Fashions) as well as industry colleagues. That’s Oct. 5 at 5 p.m. ET. Pin that to the calendar.

And have a great market week. Whatever form they take, market weeks are always worth the time.