Designer and consumer

The consumer presents a lifestyle in the way they select a design. The rooms in which they live also presents a lifestyle. Products are secondary, at best. Designers help consumers achieve their expression of lifestyle: the better the designer, the more coherent the presentation. A good salesperson can also be a good designer. Top designers in any community set the standard for lifestyle design. Top designers in any society are like real estate agents who get the most listings; they know everybody who is anybody. Helping them do their job better is the key to a working relationship. They need the retailers specialized support to access a complex market such as rugs. For every item in every room, there are three choices, make a statement, support an idea, or be a counterpoint to a statement. Traditional scatter rugs in a contemporary room can provide a color counterpoint.

A traditional formal design in a casual room can offer a structural counterpoint. Please note that every rug does not have to be on the floor to make a statement. If the business of designers is lifestyle design, why sell them rugs? Why not sell then solutions to a lifestyle aspiration. Both the kitchen and bathroom are wet. It seems obvious that both should have indoor/ outdoor rugs. If the consumer is rich enough they can put a cotton rug on a yacht and throw it away every year. There are those consumers. They just don't walk in the door every day. Every room comes with some scale; long and narrow, squarish, and with ceiling height, doors, and windows. There are basically three geographic settings. Per square foot of housing, urban, suburban and rural is likely the descending order of price per square foot. Houses on the internet now show the price per square foot of the house that is for sale, including the price per square foot in the neighborhood. Custom broadloom is part of the business of rugs. Consumers want custom sizes. Binding a cut piece of broadloom satisfies that market. The consumer can get different types of broadloom; woven, tufted, and knotted, finished to size. The key concept is making goods available to consumers suitable to their lifestyles. Just as the color of a woman's dress indicates her color preference, an address indicates wealth and, to a lesser degree, lifestyle as well. Edge cases occur when the rooms are large, and the budget is small. There are some great-looking 12x15 low-cost machine woven rugs in the market that can happily fill a budget-constrained space. Putting a picture of a rug in a room is one way to share lifestyle conversations with consumers.