Important Insights Into the State of the Design Marketplace

Peter Sallick, Michael Boodro, and Alan Blaustein from Dering Hall

All of us in the design market grew up loving physical objects. It's what we do. We love materials, textures, and details. We love things we can touch from furniture and fabrics to books and magazines to stores and showrooms.

Our passion for this experience has made us less adaptable to the digital world.

The much larger retail world has adapted faster, truly changing the behavior of all kinds of consumers. Pretty much everyone now wants immediate gratification, access to everything, and interacts with much of the world via their phone.  We should expect that our customers want to engage with us online, as well as in our showrooms. They want access to images, information, prices, and storytelling online that helps them be more efficient and more educated themselves and for their clients.

In our market today, people are more likely to come in to a showroom because they have seen something online than for any other reason. And, once they have seen it in the showroom they are highly likely to return online to get additional information. In fact, online tear sheets are among the most important resources we can provide.  Additionally, people are excited to shop beyond their local market to find new and exclusive resources.  The internet is completely and entirely ingrained in the buying behavior of all of our clients.

Designers, design brands, and artisans in the design market need to do a better job telling our story and reaching our audience online AND using the digital world as a tool to bring people into our tactile world.  Unlike large corporations, we can’t afford to develop all of the tools to do this on our own individually.  Building and maintaining state of the art sites is expensive. Driving significant traffic to sites is even more expensive. We also can’t do this working through mass market web sites.

We are writing this note because we believe Dering Hall has developed the most appropriate and sophisticated tool to help design-based companies tell your story online. As a curated and luxury platform, Dering Hall helps to educate on the value of your offering, provides access to the information buyers require, and puts you in a broader consideration set for projects than you can accomplish on your own.  We reach trade and consumers with high quality editorial content and bring them directly to your products, images and profiles in a cost effective, measurable and dynamic way.

We hope that you currently enjoy your access to Dering Hall and will consider applying for membership to our platform.

Best,

Peter, Alan, Michael and the Dering Hall team