Will the U.S. become a major textiles-producing nation again?
Even as recent as last year, this would have been inconceivable. American labor had priced itself out of the market for manufacturing just about anything ... and labor costs elsewhere, especially Asia, were a fraction of what we paid our...
To most people in the home business, China is either too close or too far with very little in between.
Too close to the people who go to China so often on sourcing trips that they become oblivious to the fact that they are in a very different country, one totally apart from the one they live in....
Forget about that slow boat to China. Take a plane. Charter one if you must.But get to China quickly. It is where you need to be.While everyone in the U.S. is complaining about rotten business, China is out of control...in a good way. I'm here at the Intertextile show in Shanghai and some 40,000...
What the change in the value of the Chinese renminbi, the cost of shipping containers, the 2010 cotton crop, steel prices, labor unrest, shortages and wages and just about everything else in China means—and does not mean—to the home furnishings industry in the U.S.:
Column AA1: The Chinese...
The ’em in this case refers to those dastardly guys who were going to destroy retailing as we knew it: e-commerce.
Remember back in the late 1990s when every forecaster worth his Blackberry and Brooks Brothers suit predicted that the Internet was going to kill conventional retailing, taking 30, 40...
OK, guys, has anybody learned anything?
As the economy slowly creeps back, big business in general—and retailers specifically—will be put to a new test: Have the lessons so painfully learned over the past 24 months been absorbed and understood? Or is everyone just going to go back to doing things...
They came, they saw, they ordered ... or they will order, the vendors hope.
That’s a very quick summary of the recent New York Home Fashions Market. Of course, there was more to market week—both positive and negative.
First, the up side: The market was well attended, not only in numbers, but in the...
Whatever ultimately caused the insane activities in the stock market last week, you have to love the theory that it was the result of what the experts call a “fat finger trade.” The technical definition seems to be that some trader somewhere hit the wrong key, hitting a B for billion rather than a...
I sure hope Target and Walmart sell boxing gloves because they are going to need them now.
These two megamonster retailers usually co-exist just fine and are not generally known for taking shots at each other. Each has pretty much staked out its positioning and when one tries to intrude upon the...
Ashley Furniture is used to breaking the rules and defying the common logic of the business and at this week’s High Point Market it did it once again. The company--which is both the biggest supplier and retailer of furniture in the country -- introduced a new retail concept called Furnish 123,...