HFN asks Tom Mirabile of Springboard Futures: “How Is Industry Responding to COVID-19?”

T Mirabile: When we look across the industry, it seems like everyone is reacting to the pandemic, everybody is reacting to it differently. But, despite the fact that these are unsettling times, our industry has never been afraid of a challenge.I think that’s one of the things that’s really frustrating right now is everybody’s just asking the same question: What’s the best thing to do right now for us? What’s the best thing to do for the industry? But let’s be honest, the challenges and the effects of this pandemic are not known yet and they probably won’t be known for some time, but we know it’s going to ripple out.

At Springboard what we decided to do was, we said okay, if we look at the industry: What are the things that we can do to help keep things moving forward, keep people engaged, people working with clients, keep people selling and developing. And that bumped up against the fact that we’ve lost a lot of market intelligence, because of the pandemic so attendance was compromised at Ambiente, we had market cancellations like the Inspired Home Show. New York Tabletop High Point, New York Textiles Market. Those markets provide a great deal of trend information, both consumer trends and style information for buyers to make decisions with, to move forward, to develop. That’s something that Springboard does really well.

So what we decided was the best move was to give our 2020 Home Trend Compass Report away with no charge to the industry. We felt like that will give people the ability to engage, to keep developing, to keep planning for the future. Consumers will come next. Because we have to wait a little bit longer to see how things develop out, what we need to do for consumers and respond to consumer trends.