FROM THE SUMMIT: The attraction and stability of the High Point Market exceeded expectations

In the midst of uncertainty, the tough-minded, intrepid merchants and manufacturers attended to their needs in ascending the High Point Market.

Surprise-surprise to the delight-delight of many showrooms, attendance and attitude rose to a higher point than what had been privately predicted and expected in High Point.

Of course, the reassuring validation of the strength of High Point rightly produces a positive spin. As an enduring institution, the Market's product and marketing opportunities for participants maintains a positive spin on business, even in challenging times.

Just ask the retailers and designers who invested in attending and ascending the High Point Market. From the summit of most showrooms, buyers received a return of powerful ideas and opportunities far greater in product and performance than if they remained at home. (In future postings here, learn how High Point is poised to overcome its challenges into a reconstituted juggernaut.)

As an indefatigable home furnishings village with its unique charm, the High Point Market continues to be a mercantile high point, a mountain range of business opportunity. It's where smart buyers find easier paths to ascend to the heights of their merchandising potential, allowing them to rise above, capturing and receiving breathtaking vistas of how to differentiate their stores and studios.

Repeated many times around the Market, retailers arriving in High Point with limited or no open-to-buy changed their minds. In the midst of a constellation of showrooms, a fresh spectrum of merchandise sharpened their vision and direction of how and where to go with confidence in these difficult times.

As with attaining anything of value, earnest investment and hard work defines and appreciates the difference for the energy expended. Of course, the rigors of shopping the High Point Market can appear, at first, to be daunting, until the fragrant efflorescence of product and opportunity blooms and stimulates all the senses.

Here's a verity that goes unnoticed. Most retailers come to High Point to work, paying little or no attention to anything other than discovering new ways to improve their businesses. If more showrooms were open late everyday, vendors would find serious buyers seizing all opportunity availed to them.

Incidentally, about High Point Market's Friday through Sunday period. That’s when honorable vendors who remained open. They benefited from a satisfactory aggregate of late comers, disrupted air travelers and foreign buyers who delivered surprising good business.

A real opportunity exists in bolstering the attraction and opportunity of the Friday through Sunday period when many of the merchants who stayed away can actually capture greater control over existing and new vendors.

Like a good teacher or coach, the High Point Market encourages many buyers to do what they may not want to do but are extremely glad they did. A substantial portion of improving the Market experience and changing attitudes can be attributed to the High Point Market Authority. This team of dedicated professionals earns the kudos for working diligently with innovation to keep putting fresh pep into the step of the Market. They know they still have more work to do.

Only at the High Point Market can retailers and merchants thoroughly evaluate new vendors. The reason is vendors can actually afford to show more for less here, even their entire line, as opposed to the curb market presentation of the Las Vegas Market, which as many retailers are characterizing as all hat (flash) and no cattle (inadequate and incomplete vendor roster).

To all the retailers and designers who constructed lame excuses to stay away, you unnecessarily placed yourself at a disadvantage. Isolated in your ofice, you don't know what you don't know, and that lack of knowledge can be deleterious to business health.

Merchants willingly depriving their customers of the breadth of High Point Market offerings pay an expensive opportunity cost of missing: The largest and most diverse product assortment, preeminence in visual merchandising and invaluable education.

In this challenging economy, when the going gets tough, the tough get going to the High Point Market to find ways to make business easier and more productive.