RISKY OR RISQUÉ BUSINESS?: Most furniture stores are too uptight and could benefit from loosening up with a little more floorplay

Repost from December 28, 2007

Sure, more furniture merchants could exude, even ooze romantic allure, as natural inviting appeal to stimulate and validate dreams we all enjoy about living better and more comfortably.

Unfortunately, most stores are too uptight, stiff and hesitant for a little acceptable frolic and roll in the, “Hey, look at that luscious, comfy bed where we could . . .” You finish the thought with your dreams, desires and inclinations, just as most consumers want to do when they're shopping.

No need for any more alienation of mercantile affection in stores, where women go when the intensity of their romantic home furnishings dreams can’t be contained and prompts passionate action.

For retailers, here’s where and when a little responsible floorplay can turn torrid desire into profitable passion and an endearing relationship. Making love to consumers is good business, not risky business but acceptable risqué business.

As a terrific in-store invitation to dream, a bed and its enveloping and attendant furniture — case goods — is the right metaphor for acceptable risqué furniture business.

To be sure my insight was in reasonable focus, I checked with my alter ego and friend, Gale Steves. She’s keen observer and arbiter of home furnishings trends at the consulting group Open House Productions, New York (click on her name to send an e-mail). If you want a fix of her bravadoh!, just check into the Finding Your Sales Voice she conducted recently with Home Furnishings Business.

My sense is the way retailers present beds appeals to our conscious and unconscious emotions. We’re invited in or not. We linger and dream or we stay awake and walk away.

Typically, beds in most stores are, as Gale observes, “overly made up, as in women wearing too much make up . . . with a wretched excess of pillowing” or beds that are too perfect, as if they have been poured into an untouchable and unreal mold.

Conversely, an unmade bed in a store can be merchandising dread. Or as Gale explains, “A badly made bed is far worse than an impeccable one. In a store, a woman seeing an unmade bed represents work undone, a form of untidiness which is a misdemeanor in her world order.”

The merchandising art and craft of creating an inviting bed nuzzled into furniture is a form of mercantile stagecraft and, of course, visual floorplay to stimulate desire whatever that may be.

“If the bed is a place of relaxation and repose, create an environment that says that here is where your dreams come true,” Gale observes.

In our conversations, and e-mail exchanges, we agreed that an inviting bed is slightly undressed, relaxed with a romantic tussle of the covers, without being lewd, unkempt or sloppy.

Think of the inviting bed as an element of a store’s mercantile résumé, prompting a consumer to say, “I want to hire that look for my home,” for rest, hope, refuge, redemption, frolic, romance, somnolence and fun.