Summer is over.
Our 13 year-old son Alex started 9th grade today. His bus arrives at 7:10, so my new wake-up alarm comes at 5:45, which gives me time to shower before dragging him out of his teen-age sleep of the dead by 6am. It only took two WAKE UP HONEY sessions this morning to get him into the shower.
I’ll do it again tomorrow morning, but at lunchtime I hop a plane for Paris and the Maison & Objet trade fair. I love that show and always look forward to going to it, but this time I am downright excited, and I don’t know why.
I always make sure my camera is stripped of images from the last trade show before I move on to another. When I brought my camera out this morning I found that I had not deleted images from the Las Vegas Market, which took place in July. That gave me an opportunity to download them to my desktop computer (all my tradeshow images reside on my MacBook, plus a back-up drive) and have a look again.
I was reminded that one of the most visible trends in Las Vegas was metallic finishes. From fabrics and leathers to framed art and accessories, metallics covered the market.
The Trend Curve has believed in metallics for some time. In fact, we created a forecast of 20 different tones in a product called Razzle Dazzle Metallics, which was released last year. In that forecast, we go beyond standard Silver and Gold to include more interesting versions of metal flavors, like Copper Blush, Gold Ingot and Mercury. And we also introduce the colored metallics we feel will have more play through 2010.
In Las Vegas we saw early signs that our forecast is right on-trend. One of the best places to confirm was Moe’s Collection. Not only did we find Silver, Gold, Bronze and Copper in picture frames and pillows, but we also found Tealy hues and Purple in a range of vases. Here are a couple of images from Moe’s Collection to show you how great metallic finishes can look.