As part of my involvement with the DOMOTEX trade fair in 2020, I presented the concept of The Showroom of the Future in which sampling is reduced to a minimum through the skillful and appropriate use of digital technology. This caught the attention of COVER Editor Lucy Upward who graciously published this condensed version of my presentation. Ideated in collaboration with Nepal’s Alternative Technology the concept remains viable and ready for whomever might choose to implement radical change to the status quo of over-sampling. The article appears in the Spring 2020 issue of COVER Magazine.
The Showroom of the Future: Is there an alternative to sampling?
Article as it appeared in COVER.
At Domotex Hannover in January, Michael Christie— A.K.A. The Ruggist and Editor of Rug Insider —gave a talk entitled ‘The Showroom of the Future’, offering ideas on how rug retailers might update their practices and a solution for the problems of endless sampling. Here he refines the presentation for COVER to focus on his ideas for reducing waste. Could this be a viable solution?
Among the many tools in a wordsmith’s veritable toolbox, the interrogative is one always close at hand. Who? What? Where? They offer easy segue into the topic at hand. Often times however this is no mere literary trick, but rather the genuine impetus. This is how the concept of ‘The Showroom of the Future’ was born; simply by asking: How can we reduce our dependence upon wasteful sampling?
Reducing wasteful sampling is a fundamental necessity, owing both to the pending climate crisis as well as to the relative financial health of the hand-knotted rug industry. It is also one with immediate, visible positive benefits. Most notably is that of fewer disused samples heading to the garbage bin once they are no longer required. The corollaries to this are even more impactful to any business: lowered costs and—ideally—increased sales with shorter lead times. Factoring in that no-one, be they weavers, makers, importers, showrooms, or otherwise makes money from the sample itself, the financial rewards realised through decreased expenditures becomes all that more appealing.
‘But how?’ I imagine you asking. As a sceptic and realist myself I understand this reasoning all too well. After all, in the mid-aughts of the 21st century I was frequent flying my way into innumerable showrooms across the United States and Canada promoting samples as the panacea which would solve all the inventory overhead problems associated with traditional hand-knotted rug retailing. Paired with extreme growth in customisation brought about by the technologies of this era and ‘BAMM!’ samples were and remain everywhere. But they also remain wasteful; once they are no longer required for the sales process they just sort of linger. Aside from possibly using one as a mat in front of a door or sink, there is all but no use for these diminutive representative works of art. It almost lessens the artistic appeal when said this way, does it not? Especially when the maquette ends up in the trash.
Thus it is that one sunny afternoon while visiting with my colleagues and friends from Alternative Technology in Kathmandu, Nepal we asked the lede question: How to reduce sampling? Notice we did not ask how to eliminate sampling as there is a tacit acknowledgement that some samples will still need to be made.
One solution already exists and it is through computer rendered visualisations of carpet designs. With each passing year these become more and more realistic but they are still lifeless, flat, smooth representations of what is a highly tactile three-dimensional product. Salespeople and consumers alike don’t have the confidence in these renderings and—to be blunt—they lack a depth of realism when printed on standard sized office paper; the scale is just all wrong.
An immediate solution, one any showroom owner or rug designer reading this could implement today, is to show the visualisation at 100% scale. This requires an HDTV of appreciable size and a commitment of time to calibrate the onscreen colours to the reference set of poms. After that, each visualisation created can be shown on screen with a high degree of realism and fidelity. This achieves the ‘look’ but not the all-important ‘touch’.
And so I asked: ‘What if we project the design onto a plain coloured sample?’ One year later and the video projector technology of today caught up with this idea and, due to this vanguard application of digital technology paired with ancient craft, the rug and carpet industry now has the ability to ‘create’ a custom rug sample simply by projecting an image onto a plain coloured sample. Whether used by rug designers behind-the-scenes or in the studio with clients, or in ways yet to be envisaged,
I posit this development has the ability to transform a time-and-resource-wasting part of the sales process into one that is far more time and resource efficient, client friendly, and profitable.
That was the original idea behind ‘The Showroom of the Future’ presentation I gave during Domotex 2020, but it is not where the concept ends. Much like ‘traditional’, the window that defines the future is constantly moving forward in time and as such we must always be adapting in order to remain relevant.
As concern for the environment is likely to continue to gain in importance to consumers, smart rug traders would be wise to keep adapting the technology of the day to suit the needs of the rug and carpet showroom of today and—of course—the future.