17/03/14 - Where are consumer's buying home decoration products?

IN STORE BUYING
The market is dominated by volume-driven retailers that are able to offer low prices, usually for mass produced items, often manufactured in China and other developing countries. The remaining specialists need to create a point of difference in terms of design or sourcing destination (eg made in the UK) in order to justify a shopping trip to their stores rather than consumers simply picking up items as an add-on to a food or clothing purchase in a non-specialist store.

ONLINE BUYING

With almost half of consumers who have bought home accessories in the past year not having bought any of them online, there is clearly room for retailers to grow this category online. However there remain obstacles in that the look and feel of many home accessories like cushions, bed linens and towels is very important. Improving websites with videos, high-resolution photography and customer reviews may offer potential solutions to overcoming consumers’ hesitation about buying products without visiting a store.

17/03/14 - Bedroom Decoration

Storage is the key feature people want for bedrooms. They want to get the most storage for their available space (47%) and have useful storage features (38%) when thinking about a bedroom revamp.

Good quality matters to 45% and 24% agree that they would pay extra to get better quality. Only 17% want basic furniture at the lowest prices.

17/03/14 - Our Customer

HOW DOES OUR CUSTOMER SHOP?

IMAGE/COST CONSCIOUS

-          These consumers want the home to look good for visitors and are quite likely to entertain and spend time in the kitchen. They are not brand- or celebrity-conscious (only 3% seek out brands) and are not always changing things, with only 12% regularly updating the look of their home.

-          They want things to look good, but will not necessarily spend to achieve this, being more likely to make the best of what they have.

-          These consumers are more likely to be female and fall into two groups, the younger 25-34 family consumers and the retired over-65s. They are generally a middle income group.

-          There are some constraining financial influences on this group, although ultimately they like things to look good. As they are not always making changes, buying well and buying to last should appeal to them.

-          Advice and products that help them make a home look good and make entertaining easier may be the way to tap into their spending power.

HOME CHANGERS

-          For this group buying new homewares is closely related to redecorating and it is this aspect that should be encouraged. Putting together complete looks that show how a room can be transformed should encourage these consumers to buy across a range.

-          These consumers are generally aged 35-54, so at the family or third age lifestage. As a result the family and home are likely to be at the core of their lifestyle.

-          Consumers in this group are also usually reasonably well off making the more affluent  family group an important segment.

17/03/14 - Wallpaper sales

MINTEL REPORTS ON INTERIOR/WALLPAPER SALES

WHO BUYS?

-       MEN AND WOMEN

“Men and women display different shopping patterns. We see that women are particularly likely to have bought decorative homewares such as tableware (crockery and cutlery), bathroom accessories and soft furnishings. Even so, men play a big role in decisions about what to buy for the home and so retailers should make every effort to aim to appeal to both men and women.”

-       FOR GIFTS

“Over a quarter of people (26%) had bought some kind of homewares as a gift in 2013. These purchases span a wide range of homewares and the most popular category is decorative accessories, which includes picture frames and ornaments (9%). These are popular with 16-24s (14%), so gifts that have appeal to a youth audience will perform well.”

“The appeal of housewares as a gift extends across the ages. Apart from under-20s, around a fifth of consumers think of housewares as a good gift. Third age and retired consumers are perhaps the keenest housewares gift buyers. Older consumers may be buying for others so there may be more opportunity to encourage them to treat themselves since they do consider housewares a good present.”

-       BRAND LOVERS

“Those looking for brands tend to favour the department stores like John Lewis and Debenhams. However, these two outlets differ considerably with John Lewis much more heavily favoured by those looking to buy gifts and its customers being more likely to have different tableware for different occasions. Debenhams, however, appeals to those who have redecorated recently, perhaps looking to upgrade their existing homewares items.”

“Key analysis: Retailers should be careful to design their ranges to cater for a spread of prices and affordability. By constructing the right price architecture, they will be able to encourage more volume of purchases. But it is important to create justification for the higher-priced lines, by highlighting better styling quality or product features. One way of doing this is to inject designer or celebrity names into the branding (eg Jamie Oliver tableware, or Orla Kiely linens).”

WHEN?

-        “Poor weather in spring and summer 2012 compounded the DIY interior decorating sector’s underperformance.”

-       “The unseasonal early-2013 weather will have dented start-of-season homeware sales for the sector. In the medium term, we think DIY retailers will be forced to cater to demand which will be less focused on traditional DIY.”

-       “When the weather is dry, consumers are most likely to make DIY decoration plans. The weather creates an ease for rearranging the home and less of a time constraint is put in place when letting the space become liveable once again.”

09/03/14 - Children's interior trends

To help with the design side of the product I looked into interior trends for children. To fit with our girls design of florals I found a trend for summer next year called 'Country Florals'.

For the under the sea theme I collected a range of images to help inspire designing for the magnetic pieces for both boys and girls.

06/03/14 - Retailers

We decided that our product will be sold in four different outlets; John Lewis, Next Home, Graham and Brown and our own website.
I looked into John Lewis and Next to get a better understanding of what kind of products they sell.
Neither websites sold anything similar to ours which would give us little competition when selling within these retailers. However Next didn't sell any children's wallpapers on their website which is a problem. If Next don't sell their own wallpapers for children, they are unlikely to want to sell a wallpaper from an external company.

05/03/14 - Design Meet up

For each pack of magnetic pieces we have decided to have five pieces in each pack with four different designs meaning two pieces will be the same. Each piece will be 20x20cm and about 3mm thick.

We had the idea of having additional magnetic pieces made of just magnetic paper which would be flexible which had numbers and letters on for educational purposes. However this may over complicate our product.

We decided on three different products to sell.
- A starter pack; 2 metres of magnetic wallpaper and 2 magnetic pieces.
- A 10m roll of magnetic wallpaper.
- A pack (various designs) which each have 5 magnetic pieces in it.

After looking at the questionnaire results that Annabelle and Amy collected together and we found that the most common themes are: stars, football, animals, hearts and flowers.

We then decided on three different themes, one for boys - football, one for girls - flowers and one for both - sea creatures.

Our background wallpaper is going to be plain to keep our first year of costs lower. Perhaps after a year we could start to design patterned wallpaper.