In the ever-changing landscape of the business and practice of commercial interior design, the only constant is transformation, and nothing stays the same for long. In many recent travels throughout the design community, I have heard an increasingly frequent intonation of frustration from the manufacturing side of the business.
Acquiring focused attention from the staff members of today’s top design firms is getting increasingly hard to achieve. Capturing that elusive quality time with today’s design professionals is a challenge for vendors above and beyond what it was even a few years ago, and even holding a meaningful conversation at a lunch appointment can be a challenging task today.
Just as in everything else in our contemporary workplace, as well as across the design industry, what many of us now experience has fragmented into short bursts of information and passing glimpses of fleeting images brought to us via our smartphones. For many, the feeling of engagement and connection is at an all-time low. The die-hard salespeople on the manufacturing side just want to keep doing their job, and can’t figure out what changed so quickly. Designers are saying the same thing about wanting to do their job, but have a very different outlook on the world than the previous generation.
There are several factors at play here.
The management of the design side of the industry is stretched to the limit in terms of meeting client expectations and making money. Doing more with less has been a fact of life for the last 10 years for them, and design fees are not going up anytime soon. There is plenty of work available, but today’s construction projects don’t operate the way they did 10 years ago.
Deadlines are tighter, and the best way to keep a project profitable is for everyone in the office to spend less billable time on it. Because design is more of a service-based business, architecture firms are used to regularly adapting to external economic conditions; for the manufacturing side, because they are committed to producing and selling material goods, they have never seen a shift quite like this. Fewer and fewer designers are open to being entertained at an extravagant lunch or dinner, or even accept a ticket to a once-popular design event. The indulgences of free alcohol at industry events are now giving way to an increase in yoga or meditation classes in furniture showrooms. Health, both mental and physical, is the new gratification.
Millennial interior designers communicate in a fundamentally different way than previous generations. In their case, what they see and experience is typically tailored to their taste, and funneled through a video screen. They are the first generation of digital natives, but that does not mean they are opposed to quality time or building face-to-face relationships. They do, however, need to be encouraged to do it and gently nudged into the world of in-person experiences. Millennials look up to older generations, and doing a good job is a priority for them.
I come from Generation X, arguably the smallest generation in the U.S. We, like the Baby Boomers before us, let the previous generations know how we felt, what mattered to us, and generally what we wanted. Millennials are not like that. They are not televising their revolution. Leaving digital breadcrumbs across their lives, each one is famous in their own way – not for 15 minutes like my generation was, but they do have a secret (and sometimes not-so-secret) desire to be famous all the time. They want to be known and appreciated on their terms.
The best way for manufacturers to engage with that way of thinking is through a one-on-one relationship, and probably not face-to-face in the beginning. Since Millennials experiences are often digital, and since most designers are visual thinkers, one of the best places to stay in regular contact with them is via Instagram.
I can already anticipate a lot of groaning from the older generations, saying things like “Joining Instagram would be just another platform I have to keep up with,” and “I’m too busy for that.” I think that is what a lot of Millennials are thinking when asked to attend today’s antiquated design industry events. The world may have changed, but human nature has not. We all still crave a certain level of attention and engagement, and finding out how to crack every new generation’s code is an iterative process that needs to be methodical, not emotional.
One-on-one engagement for each designer is a big investment for every vendor seeking quality time with designers, and there is no guarantee how long the Millennials they court will stay working in the industry. However, the methodology of group experiences like extravagant showroom parties and broadcasting the same message to the entire industry is clearly not working for vendors the way it did in the past.
Something has to change. Something has already changed; the manufacturing side of the industry must acknowledge those changes and embrace adaptation and experimentation the way the design side did years ago. Quality time is defined differently for each generation, and this is just the beginning.