Design, business, which is the gold signboard of the furniture exhibition

The low booth fee and high cost performance make the DOD Pavilion of China International Furniture Fair a “competitive place” for young designers and independent design brands. Professional buyers Ding Hao will come here every year to "sample". Despite years of accumulation, a number of design brands such as Muzhi Workshop, Voice, Van Gogh, Lost and Found have already had tens of thousands of fans on the Internet, but they have to interact with professionals like Ding Wei to transform their popularity. To become a business, you have to rely on these traditional exhibitions.

Last year, the number of exhibitors at the DOD Pavilion was 120, and this year it surged to 167. After the organizer's mediation, the parking area on the side also became part of the pavilion. The display space is smaller and more crowded, which is a common feeling for exhibitors. The designer of the Vatican has to refer to the structure of the art installation and hang the new chair on the top beam; Zhao Lei, CEO of Muzhi Workshop, considers spending 20 times more budget to move the booth to the W Hall next year.

As a regular pavilion for the furniture fair, a decent closed booth in the W Pavilion requires seven or eight hundred thousand rents, while the price of the DOD pavilion is 7,500 yuan. According to Zhu Zhirui, the sales manager of the DOD Pavilion, the DOD Pavilion, which is the design incubator, does not make money at the rental cost of the Shanghai New International Expo Center. In the past four years, they have invested a total of 5 million yuan for the project. The organizers of the China (Shanghai) Furniture Fair and the Shanghai Fashion Home Show held in September all paid heavily, and invited famous designers to create concept exhibitions.

The most important profit model for commercial exhibitions is the sale of booths. Now, not to make money or even post money, the commercial exhibition companies that have designed brands outside the traditional business are far more than the Bohua family, the organizer of China International Furniture Fair. Within a few years, the trend of furniture exhibitions has turned sharply, the eye-catching effect brought by the support of original design, and the promotion of the word-of-mouth and image of the exhibition have become the focus of people's attention.

 

Upgrade in the bubble

The major furniture exhibitions and home furnishing exhibitions in the first-tier cities are like the barometers of the Chinese design and manufacturing industry, and are also the epitome of the development of the entire industry. The most typical example is the China International Furniture Fair in 1993. Initially, the furniture exhibition positioned “to let European furniture knock on the door of the Chinese market”, the exhibition is the world of European furniture. After 2000, with the establishment of China's "world factory" status, the protagonist of the exhibition has gradually become a domestic furniture manufacturing enterprise.

With low labor costs, coupled with ODM and OEM models for OEM design and production, local manufacturing companies quickly accumulate funds and experience in just over a decade. However, due to the lack of originality awareness and brand awareness of most manufacturers, a large number of similar so-called best-selling items will appear on the booths of different exhibitors at the same exhibition. "The most exaggerated one, I saw a Hans Wagner's classic circle chair on the same furniture in Guangdong. It appeared in different booths with 10 different materials and 20 different colors." Teacher Liu Wei recalled. That year, he also saw that he had “refitted” the new work “Chinese” on the traditional Chinese bench in the previous year, and was “cottaged” by many manufacturers. "Although the styles are the same, the details of the volume and proportion are very embarrassing, and it is really impossible to see." Liu Wei repeatedly urged those exhibitors to eliminate the "cottage" exhibits without fruit, quite helpless. “The furniture sector at the time was led by the manufacturer, and the designer’s voice and influence were weak.”

Other manufacturers who branded, although they no longer think about how to put more products into limited booths, they only focus on exports for profit and production. Before 2008, there were some exhibitors at major furniture fairs who held the sign of “Rejecting Domestic Customers”. Because of the fear of the domestic counterparts "cottage", in the doorway of the closed booth that is carefully built like a model, the responsible staff is critically examining the business cards handed down by the visitors, for fear of having a fish in the water. Today, Gujiajiao, which frequently advertises in the mass media, was once a member of this type of export team.

However, after 2008, the weak consumer demand caused by the economic crisis in Europe and the United States and the restrictions on anti-dumping caused the overseas ODM and OEM orders and export share to decline rapidly, while domestic consumers gradually began to recognize the charm of original design and reversed the situation. The importance of original design has gradually become prominent in the exhibition. The most obvious example is the “Design Shanghai” hosted by the British exhibition company Media10 in the spring of 2013. In addition to a press conference, it did not preheat too much in the early stage, and the exhibits brought by brands such as Alessi and Hay were not the first show, but in the two days of the public open day, the long and hot doorway The water in front of the booth is not enough to prove people's enthusiasm for excellent original design at home and abroad.

Relying on the exuberant popularity, the current booth price of “Design Shanghai” is more than 7 times that of the DOD Pavilion. In stark contrast to the blockbuster “Design Shanghai”, the manufacturer-oriented furniture exhibitions held in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Dongguan frequently encounter “Waterloo”. The cold spot of the booth has been the "news" for several consecutive years. There is a rough observation of the media. From the perspective of people flow, the number of exhibitors may be a little more than the professional audience. In 2014, the exhibition company of the Canton Fair moved the furniture exhibition to Shanghai, and created a home fair to directly compete with Bohua's furniture exhibition. It also relied on the background of Shanghai's “creative capital” to complete the transformation of traditional business exhibitions.

 

The fire has not arrived

Bo Hua founder Wang Mingliang once announced to the media that “the furniture exhibition will be part of the Milan exhibition and the home exhibition part will be made into the Paris exhibition”, but this is easy. “After I went to the Paris Home Furnishings Expo, I found that their professional buyers are very clear and completely different from the domestic business environment.” The founder of the accident design, Huang Guodong, participated in the Paris Home Furnishing Expo in September and rushed back to the domestic exhibition. . In the first two days, there were domestic buyers looking for custom gift designs as gifts for the company's business partners. The buyers and agents of the art derivation stores he wanted to look for did not appear too much.

“In Paris, a large part of the audience who came to see the exhibition were such people. They chose the design to be vicious, precise and efficient.” Huang Guodong also clearly felt that in the days after the exhibition, there were obviously more people watching the show. The transactions that can be truly achieved are limited. "After a few days, the people who watched the show should be FITs, interested in the design of small things, and then inquired." But this is not the main purpose of the designers like him to participate in the exhibition.

Senior designer Chen Dari pointed out that young designers participate in the exhibition, one is to play their own brand, improve the visibility of their works and their own, and increase their popularity; the second is to find partners and target customers in various social and marketing ways during the exhibition. And agents. The experience of the organizers of the Milan Furniture Fair is actually worth learning from the organizers of the domestic exhibitions: they put the main body of the exhibition and the “Milan Satellite Show”, which also has the function of design incubator, in different positions in the city.

Because of the distance between the two on the geography, art and design-related institutions such as galleries and shoppers have naturally become social places for designers, brands and professional audiences. “The atmosphere of these occasions is different from the exhibition itself. It is easy to collide with new sparks, instead of holding a calculator to talk about business.” Chen Darui admits that although these large-scale furniture exhibitions and home fairs in China will also hold designers. The night of the reception, but the time is short, it is one night. He believes: "There should be more soft social space, so that designers and buyers, 'Xingshen' have more communication space, and will help new designers to find out the rules of the game as soon as possible. ”

The ever-increasing number of exhibitors and a large audience can only create a surface prosperity. Compared with the top international exhibitions with a history of 50 or 60 years, many details have not been considered for the domestic furniture exhibitions on the transition road. In addition, the overall environment of the old European design towns, the understanding and acceptance of the design is also different from the domestic cities. When domestic furniture exhibitions and home exhibitions establish "small goals", all they can do is concept first.

However, this difference and distance are also shrinking. On the one hand, at the official level, the North has deepened its investment and support for the design industry. This kind of support is also to make the design aesthetic education gradually popular among the masses, laying a foundation for the future development of the design industry. The management of the exhibition organizers for design and business is also reflected in the establishment of awards. Nowadays, the original members of the Red Dot Award and the iF Award are introduced to the China National Furniture Fair and the Shanghai Fashion Home Show respectively. The benefits of the international awards will be realized later.

As the proportion of original design increases, some furniture manufacturers and hotel owners have begun to look for designers at the domestic furniture fair. At the domestic furniture exhibition, Zhou Wei received the Hydrangea from the brand HC28 and ACF, and then got the Qumei brand visual upgrade project, although the works he exhibited in this session have not yet been mass-produced.