Happy New Year!

And welcome, once again, to a refreshed version of Home Accents Today.

We have worked hard over the past several months planning our 2009 strategy, and some of the ideas come to fruition this month.

We have re-cast our Design Directions pages as Style Setters — there we focus on best-sellers, rather than new products, so you retailers can really get a feel for what's working right now.

We have also added a new rotating monthly feature — Industry Roundup. We begin this month with Green (page 65). Our other themes are Good News, Made in the USA and Licensing.

We also devote a page to Store Openings. This offers a snapshot of new stores opening around the country. And yes, there are actually a lot of them, even in these tough times — see page 67 for a rundown of the latest.

We have added a new columnist to our Business Memo — Melissa Galt. Melissa is a noted interior designer, who also works as a career/business coach in the industry. She adds an exciting new voice to our lineup, which also includes consultant Randy Eller and Internet marketing expert Penny Schneck.

New this month is Retailer to Retailer — a rotating guest column from some of the most creative retailers out there. Longtime columnist Lynni Megginson kicks us off this month, but look for a variety of new faces in upcoming months.

One other change in this issue is that we have reworked our Objects page a bit, and now offer the products in a high-medium-low price-point presentation — so that you will be able to tell immediately what is the right product for your store.

We also added a new page at the back of the book — Color. It's a fast, fun look at one color that we are seeing across product categories. To kick it off, we went with Rainbow — using a lot of colors — to give it an especially punchy start.

All this is just in this issue! We have a lot of big ideas that we will be implementing in the next few months, so do stay tuned for more.

We recognize that these are tough times, so we are redoubling our efforts to ensure that HAT maintains its “must-read” status. Let us know how we are doing or what else we can do to improve — jheinzen@reedbusiness.com.

See you at the shows.