Today’s Weekend Journal section of The Wall Street Journal had an article on the front page called “Au Revoir, Armoire.” I had to smile when I saw it. I wrote an article for the blog you are reading today in December of 2004 with a similar title. “Goodbye Armoire” was my first post on December 26 after having debuted the Connecting The Dots blog on the 24th.
In that post almost three years ago, I referenced a piece I had written for The Trend Curve™ even further back. It was from December of 1999, when I devoted the majority of that issue to my trend predictions for home décor in the coming decade. If you guessed that the death of the armoire was among those predictions, you are right. That was almost eight years ago.
I want to point out that The Journal writer, Juliet Chung, wrote a very nice piece, and its timing really was perfect for the consumer market. But for those who are planning for the future and preparing assortments, risking inventory dollars and allocating production resources, it is important to have long lead times on change. That’s exactly what we provide in each issue of The Trend Curve, in every seminar we give and in all of the color products we develop. When I saw “Au Revoir, Armoire” in the today’s Wall Street Journal, I felt like we had done our job on the topic of armoires quite well.
If you would like to see the original December 26, 2004 post, “Goodbye Armoire,” just look on the right side of this page at the Archives area and click back to December of 2004—or just click this link. To see Ms. Chung’s piece for The Wall Street Journal, pick up the November 10 – 11 issue and head for page W1., since This link from The WSJ site may not remain live for too long.