Luxury's New Customer
Militant Expectations of The New Affluent

Interior designers and to-the-trade design centers stand at the crossroads of a great new challenge. They must make their way with a new type of consumer, a customer who has high standards and very high demands, and whose demographic profile and attitudes are unlike clients the design industry has dealt with in the past. This new consumer is different in a fundamental way, and design centers must adapt to this consumer or risk being passed over.

This new customer we'll call the new affluent is set apart by their expectations. They are highly educated, well informed, and perhaps even militant in the level of goods and services they feel is theirs by right. This new strident consumer is part of a bigger consumer trend called Generation C, a buying group not defined by what year they were born but framed by their greater demands in the luxury marketplace. The "C" stands for create and curate, content and communities. Gen C is looking for a more involved role in the creation process, and a stronger connection to the world around them.

To understand why their attitudes are different, it's important to examine who this new affluent customer is. In this age when the consumer rules, the wealthy client is not the wealthy client of thirty or even ten years ago. They are not interested in the pretensions of exclusivity for exclusivity sake, nor do they want exactly what the neighbors have. They are not from old money and are not necessarily interested in emulating it.

Being newly affluent does not make their pockets any less deep, however. Market research has generally concluded that there are a million, million-dollar houses in the US. These new affluents, primed by shelter magazines and cable TV, are ready to spend.

Design-center showrooms carry the luxurious resources and the professionalism to bring just the sort of beautiful designs the burgeoning affluent class desire and will pay to get. Consider that the high-end consumer has already made retailers like Restoration Hardware and Williams Sonoma Home successful because they supply serviceable design.

We've taken a snapshot of the new affluent consumer; now let's consider what they face when approaching a design center with an old business model. Home furnishings to-the-trade is about the last remaining market that tries to dictate how the consumer is supposed to behave: they are excluded from the showroom, and told so in a fairly disrespectful way. Everywhere else they shop for luxury, the experience is exactly the opposite.

Design centers and their tenants must create an atmosphere that welcomes the luxury-minded consumer. Perhaps as a destination for luxury and home furnishings, an information destination would welcome this new breed of consumer with comfortable, hospitable, sensuously upscale places to meet interior designers and consider design. A place is needed where consumers can review designers' portfolios, and begin to understand the possibilities of using all the resources that a designer in a design center can bring to bear. A grander and bigger lifestyle can and must be sold beyond what is being offered at Pottery Barn.

Once a new affluent has come to appreciate all that is possible with a designer at a design center —spanning casegoods, upholstered goods, art, rugs, lighting, window coverings, and accessories designed for them—then design centers will compare more favorably to instant-gratification retailers.

Part of the new mode of operation must include addressing the pricing of goods within the design center. The interior-design market is already moving rapidly to design fees; soon there will be one net price on everything for everyone. Discounts are going away. The savvy consumer, who has the power of the web at their disposal, thinks that discount pricing is obfuscation. The value of interior design is in the design, not the mark-up or discount on merchandise.

The new affluent customers' needs cannot be ignored, and business as usual will not bring them to spend with designers at design centers. Their expectations must be met directly, and this should include rethinking the business model at design centers. New affluents are out there. Once in the door, if they can be shown the lifestyle of true design, that is where they will stay to spend their money.

Stephen Nobel is a member of the Luxury Marketing Council in New York and co-founder of the Luxury Home Alliance. He is also the author of Aiming at Affluence: Marketing Interior Design to Luxury Clients. For more information, visit www.nobelinks.com. FFI