Around the Eco World in 180 days

Chicago retailer Lisa Rosenberg sent out invitations to a special in-store event in October, a weeklong exhibition of products from three of her favorite vendors. The product description included, among others, the words "ecologically-friendly," "undyed," "100% organic," "natural fibers," "environmentally-managed" and "sustainable forest."

She also sent out a press release announcing that her shop, Arrelle's Fine Linens, includes in its inventory botanical- and green-themed pillows and accessories and a selection of organic, cotton and natural latex mattresses. Rosenberg has been selling most of these items in her 28-year-old store for years, but she's positioning them a little differently these days.

"We've been carrying these products for a long time — natural cottons, virgin wools, linens — but the environmentally correct category has never been part of our brand identity. With most of our lines, luxury and organics have just always gone hand in hand." And though she's added some new blankets made from Lyocell (fibers from sustainably grown beech trees), she wonders out loud why none of her vendors have shown her any bamboo product yet.

Chris Bruning (center) and his buddy the frog personally deliver a batch of Stay Green T-shirts to Susan Barber at the English Road showroom of Charleston Forge during the spring 2007 High Point Market.

To savvy marketers like Rosenberg, catering to a growing demand among consumers for sustainable and organic products, environmentally friendly fabrics and fairly traded goods has outlasted the run of a typical trend and is something worth experimenting with.

Consider this: During the 180 days that began with the opening of the High Point Market on March 26 of this year, the home furnishings industry has added an EcoStyle Pavilion (High Point), a Green Product Showcase (Atlanta), a Living Green Pavilion and Greenhouse Gallery (Las Vegas), a sustainability exhibit (New York), and the first trade fair dedicated solely to the cause, Live Green Live Well (San Francisco). Along the way, a few new players have entered the green field only to find some old players introducing new green product lines. Plus, those who've been playing on the green field for a while are now finding more economic benefit in talking about it, new channels through which to do it, and a receptive audience that wants to hear more.

EcoStyle Pavilion and Sustainable Furniture Council debut in High Point

When Merchandise Mart Properties Inc. and the Sustainable Furniture Council launched the first eco-friendly home furnishings pavilion at High Point's 2007 spring market, Chris Bruning, vice president of Dallas-based Groovystuff, said it was something he'd waited 10 years for. Bruning, a longtime design devotee of reclaimed, recycled woods and a founding member of the SFC, saw it as a perfect time to promote his company's products while drawing attention to the EcoStyle Pavilion and the mission of the SFC.

And draw attention he did — by stepping out of his showroom to make daily rounds with a giant green frog, giving away "Stay Green" buttons and frog-emblazoned T-shirts, and playing green-themed music in the Groovystuff showroom. "It received a lot of market press, but handing out the T-shirts with my buddy the frog was so much fun, I was literally exhausted at the end of the day," Bruning said. "Advertising at this level, having this kind of presence was a first for me and I will do it again. I'm not a political person — outside of my family, friends and this company, this is the only thing I've felt like really standing up for."

Gerry Cooklin, CEO of South Cone Trading Company, is credited with founding the SFC, the first meeting of which was held at the October 2005 High Point Market. By July of this year, Susan Inglis, SFC treasurer and president of From the Mountain, reported that the SFC's membership had doubled since the spring. And according to Karen Olson, vice president of marketing for MMPI, the EcoStyle Pavilion has already doubled in size for the fall market.

"When we launched this initiative last spring, it was the first focused showcase of sustainable products for the residential home furnishings industry," Olson added. Not anymore.

Green gathers momentum in Atlanta and Las Vegas

AmericasMart's Green Product Showcase launched at July's International Gift & Home Furnishings Market with a juried exhibition of more than 300 sustainable, green and recycled products. Laura Turner Seydel delivered remarks and joined AmericasMart President Jeffrey L. Portman for a well-attended ribbon cutting ceremony and champagne reception.

The Green Product Showcase featured a juried collection of more than 300 sustainable, green and recycled products — area rugs, apparel, gourmet, furniture and furnishings, gifts and decorative accessories — in a wide variety of price points and designs, submitted by permanent and temporary exhibitors. The exhibit also shed more light on responsible sourcing and manufacturing, as well as the creative solutions some designing minds have found for tired trash, such as bowls made from vinyl LPs and winestoppers topped with old billiard balls and doorknobs.

Jim Hankins was in Atlanta shopping for green merchandise to fill the shelves of the gift shops in Dell Children's Medical Center of Central Texas. "Dell (Computer Co.) gave us $25 million to help open the hospital and it's a completely green hospital, the first to go green nationally," Hankins said. "We were asked to come up with at least 25% green merchandise," and because online research had yielded little more than organic clothing, he found himself shopping the Atlanta market.

A few weeks later, the World Market Center launched its Living Green Pavilion, a collaborative effort with the SFC and Channel Logic Inc. (a sustainable products representation firm based in Carlsbad, Calif.) to organize several thousand square feet of sustainable home furnishings product in the Sands Expo Center. The WMC aggressively marketed and promoted the initiative with pre-show and at-market mail and advertising, making sure marketgoers were well aware of the other environmentally conscious manufacturers who were showing new sustainable product lines in Buildings A and B.

In the showrooms, vendors such as Brandon Andersen of Fireside Lodge Furniture Co. sparked buyers' interest with commentary on the origin of his products, such as the logs used in the construction of Fireside Lodge's furniture. The logs are Northern white cedar, reclaimed as a byproduct of the lumber business. "You can't make lumber out of the logs if they're six inches or less in diameter. Ten years ago, those rejected logs would have been burned," Andersen said. "We reclaim them and hand-peel them to preserve the wood's grain, knots and color variation."

Brazil Baroque's Andrea Fonseca brought her mother to the Vegas market to help with the steady stream of traffic in the company's showroom. Fonseca, a native of Rio de Janeiro, founded Brazil Baroque five years ago when she began using salvaged hardwoods from the abandoned buildings of old Brazilian plantations and farming operations to create furniture. "The result is pieces made from beautiful woods that would be illegal to cut today, some of which are hundreds of years old," Fonseca said. "They're unique, many look like antiques, and they'll last generations."

Within the Living Green Pavilion, the Greenhouse Gallery presented a juried sampling of products by eco-friendly designers and manufacturers from around the world. "We have discovered that the producers of furniture using sustainable materials are not only pioneers, but also design innovators," said Tim Branscome, WMC's vice president of international business development. "The introduction and availability of various new sustainable materials appears to have stimulated a whole new community of designers who are now finding their way into the market."

Edward Hazan, an independent consultant, visited the Greenhouse Gallery where one such design, a bamboo lounge chair and ottoman created by one of his clients, Directions East, was featured. "The designer of this piece has worked with bent plywood for many years, and he applied the same techniques to bend and shape the bamboo," Hazan said. "The sustainable category represents a new direction for the company and they were just accepted as a member of the SFC."

In addition to its permanent space in High Point, Hazan said Directions East is taking a second space in MMPI's EcoStyle Pavilion for the fall market, and that when he inquired about getting space for another client, he was told all the spaces had been spoken for.

Hazan thinks green is here to stay. "I see it everywhere I go, and it's part of every conversation. In New York, there was a big exhibit in the lobby area featuring sustainable products from different companies." Hazan is referring to August's New York International Gift Fair, where a display called "Sustainability: Design for a better world" was billed as "a presentation of 200 everyday items that look good, feel good and do good."

Next up on the trade show circuit is San Francisco Mart's "Live Green, Live Well" sustainable home furnishings and design show Sept. 19-20, billed as "the first trade fair solely dedicated to sustainable furnishings and design." Roseann Carini, general manager of the SF Mart, said education is a very important component of the show. "Designers and retailers must understand sustainable terms, certifications and processes so that they can educate their clients and customers."

Luxury and organics go hand in hand at Lisa Rosenberg's Chicago store, Arrelle's Fine Linens, where she's carried the natural-fiber lines Legna and The Purists by SDH/YGLE, Bonjour of Switzerland and F. Leitner alongside luxury linens brands such as Porthault and Frette for years. One of her latest orders was for Lyocell blankets from HomeSource International, a new vendor for Rosenberg.

Going forward, education and standards are key as understanding the product, verifying its authenticity, and communicating that information to the customer becomes the big challenge for retailers. The general consensus of retailers interviewed at the Atlanta and Las Vegas markets was that five years ago, none of their customers asked where it came from or what it was made of. Now, they're asking questions ... and so are retailers.

Hobble Creek Trading Company of Springville, Utah, carries a lot of environmentally friendly and green inventory, and Ryan Gledhill said many of his customers specifically ask for things made from reclaimed or recycled wood, or if a finish is water or poly-based. "We ask our vendors to provide a write-up on how they got the wood, or confirm that the wood was dead standing, reclaimed or recycled," Gledhill said. Krissy Millner of Terra Firma Home in Medford, Ore., said she asks the same, "I've always used vendors with green product lines and asked where the wood came from, how it was processed, whether it was plantation-grown, if it was finished with a water-based stain."

Market buyers Nicole and Patrick Williams of Santa Barbara, Calif.'s Bungalow 319 also make sure they're dealing with reputable companies that practice fair trade. It's this added component of social equity that makes a "green" product a "sustainable" one, according to Mike Italiano, CEO of the Institute for Market Transformation to Sustainability, a nonprofit organization of environmental groups, companies and governments.

MTS provides training and education on the criteria for sustainable certifications across several product categories and is the organization behind the SMART standard, which has been incorporated into the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED rating system. For home furnishings retailers, certification through organizations like MTS, the Forest Stewardship Council and the Sustainable Forestry Initiative are becoming more essential as consumers become more source-conscious and resellers look for ways to verify a product's authenticity.

The SFC's board met in August to form an educational committee with the purpose of bringing members and the industry as a whole along the sustainability path. Chris Bruning of Groovystuff and Holly Barbo of Barbo Furniture are leading the committee, which will identify resources to inform the consumer and manufacturing sector; create a glossary of terms; provide resources for understanding issues; plan and carry out educational events, both at trade shows and in-store events for retailers; publish a weekly e-newsletter and provide content for press releases.

An initiative was also announced by the American Home Furnishings Alliance, an eco-label program called Sustainable Choice to be launched in November. The program ties into AHFA's 6-year-old EFEC (Enhancing Furniture's Environmental Culture) conservation initiative.

But for some retailers, sustainability education begins at home. Porto, a fine home furnishings and accessories store with locations in Raleigh and Chapel Hill, N.C., is one of a few retailers on the SFC's list of founding members and the only furniture store in North Carolina to be accredited by the organization so far. The retailer recently announced plans for an environmental educational section/learning space at its Chapel Hill location, something it is doing in partnership with South Cone.

Porto was founded by owners Emily Barrett and Michael Perry in 2004 on the premise that responsibilities extend beyond the showroom doors. The store carries only the collections of companies that practice environmental stewardship and social responsibility.

Since its opening, Porto has carried South Cone, whose executive vice president, Einar Elsner, said awareness of sustainability has reached a new high, but the process has just begun. "The next stage will be to set standards and differentiate between those who are green washing and those who are pursuing verifiable and transparent steps toward sustainable business practices. It's an exciting time."

A sustainable products sampling: (clockwise from top left) Breeze bamboo tables by Directions East, The Purists 100% organic cotton bedding by SDH, a console from Groovystuff, Tre bamboo lounge and ottoman by Directions East, Root of the Earth tables by Shiraleah.