We are now in the new year and are still being assaulted with everyone’s thoughts on what will be trending in 2022. During the last few weeks, people and companies have been enlightening us as to what they think will happen in the new year. It seem everyone is chipping in their predictions on everything from this year’s hot colors to the Dow Jones Industrials. Please, no one can consistently call the future, unless they are the source of the future, and, you know, the best decorative plumbing showrooms can be that type of source. Every product, brand and display you have added or changed is a reach into the future of decorative plumbing products in your market, and you should be damn proud of that.

Don’t believe me? Don’t think you know what will be selling in 2022? If you don’t you had better get work.

It is utterly impossible for talented and over-booked designers, builders, architects and plumbers to remain current as to all the emerging products, color/finish shifts and innovations that are continually happening in the home and commercial industry. No matter how intelligent the individual or how skillful and hard working their team, they cannot always remain in-the-know on everything. That is why the world’s most accomplished designers, builders and architects trust their reputation to their collection of market leading and market challenging showrooms and their crack sales people.  They rely that these brands will always know what is hot, new and coming soon. These design and building professionals present, specify and purchase everything from timber to toilets.  If it goes into a space to be built and designed, they need to know all about it and they know they do not have the time to review all the “expert” future guesses.  When they want to know a hot trend in faucet finishes, they reach out to their insightful and trusted decorative plumbing showroom source.

For the showrooms, maintaining product knowledge, past, present, and future is an important part of their role in servicing and supporting the luxury and premium market. If a new, redesigned or expanded product line is introduced from a viable manufacturer who engineers and manufactures a good product and is profitable, it must be placed on display. This is not the time for you and your team to judge the product design and how it will fair in the market. That is not your call, your call is to get it on display and present it to your professional clients, design motivated homeowners and educate your local media. Let them be the judge. Let them answer, what do you think of this? The future will always be full of new products that are beautiful, okay and awful and any of them could be successful or a bomb. It is not a showroom’s position to judge. The showroom’s role is to display and listen and learn.

The next step is to make sure your local vendor sales people and their sales managers keep you and your team in-the-loop as to any new products that are on the way or have been presented at a local or national or international trade show. We understand if a product is introduced at KBIS or shown on Interior Design Magazine’s web site, the actual displays might not ship for months but you and your team of soothsayers must know all about it.   The goal is to never have a designer, architect, builder, homeowner or plumber telephone, email, text or walk into your showroom and ask about a new product that you do not have on display or know about. Sure there will be products that professionals and homeowners discover that you and your clairvoyant team have somehow missed.  But, you know where to find this new product and make darn sure that brand adds you to their “to be updated list” 

The next step is to make sure every player in your market knows that you have a direct line to the future. Every time you present the future in your showrooms make sure everybody in your world knows about it. Post it on your website’s homepage, present it in your blog, send out a postcard and make sure everyone who sees it in your showroom knows it is a new product.  This is all very simple, add a new product box to your brand’s homepage, the blog posting can be an image with a short description and a call to visit the showroom and the vendor should gladly pay for the postcards. Do not overthink this. Just get the word out!

Never let anybody forget that your showrooms are the home of the future. Always encourage your team to dig for what is new. And, do not allow any vendor sales person, sales manager or marketer ignore your law that you need to know what is their now, new and next.

Finally, never guess about the future; be the future.