Just one complaint

Becky Boswell Smith -- Home Accents Today, 4/10/2007 9:46:00 AM

Over the past several months we have conducted online surveys about several product categories, asking retailers what their biggest complaint is about accent furniture, rugs and tabletop.

We’ll ask about other categories as the year progresses, but you can see the current month’s survey results on tabletop by clicking here.

The good news is how many retailers don’t have a complaint about the categories – or not a strong enough one to voice. Vendors should be very happy about that.

Most of the complaints center on quality and space, no matter the category.

Small stores are challenged in merchandising accent furniture pieces and rugs, to be sure, particularly those who have home accent stores and don’t want to use rug racks.

But, as several retailers said, when you put the rugs on the floor to show them well, they get soiled and nobody wants them. And as for those large pieces of furniture: "It’s expensive to buy, sits longer in the store and often gets put on sale because we get tired of seeing it in the store."

Inconsistent quality is mentioned frequently, especially with reorders that don’t meet the original look and with products that don’t seem the same once they are in the store as they did in the showroom.

Other complaints: There isn’t enough variety across each category, and the product’s lifetime is too short. Talking about tabletop vendors dropping patterns that don’t perform well too quickly, one retailer observed, "If companies can’t have faith in their patterns and give them time to ‘catch on,’ how are we expected to encourage our customers to get excited about a new pattern?"

Substitute chair, lamp or rug for pattern, and you get the idea.

There are some valid (and some whiny) complaints here. What do you think? Do you agree with the gripes? Have some of your own? Or is your relationship with your vendors such that you can work through the issues together? Let me know on my blog at homeaccentstoday.com.

I’ll end with this observation from another retailer: "Trends tend to vary from one extreme to the other. Everyone wants all of it."

Ain’t that the truth.