Diversifying and expanding your product range is a constant and non-negotiable aspect of running a retail business. As trends shift, inevitably, so must your collections. This consistent need for replenishment has never been more apparent for furniture retailers as interior design trends shifts towards eclecticism and away from uniformity. The day of mismatched furniture dawns.
In particular, designers and homeowners alike can’t seem to resist the pull of mismatched dining sets. Dining tables with varying seating, from benches to different style chairs, add a real charm to dining areas. Perhaps it’s the nearly limitless possibilities or the fact that you can create a practically bespoke arrangement in your dining room that adds to its pull. But what exactly does it mean for your business?
Photography credit to Pinterest.
This trend offers customers the opportunity to experiment within their own boundaries. However, this limitless freedom can seem quite daunting. There are a few failsafe ways to streamline your client's needs through the products you supply.
Try offering your dining chairs in pairs. Two sets of alternating chairs have enough of a variation for your clients to know if the mismatched dining trend is for them. This method is distinctly less overwhelming and chaotic than buying four or more individual chairs and ending up dissatisfied with the finished results.
Photography credit to Pinterest.
You’ll likely find that this method is the easiest to integrate into your business, especially for retailers who have the facilities to hold stock. Majority of wholesaler’s package and supply their dining chairs in pairs to facilitate shipping. This, in turn, makes your client bound deliveries both cheaper and more convenient.
Offer a variety, from bohemian to industrial. The process is intended to be creative and fun; the larger your range of seating solutions, the more creative your customers can be with their dining room.
For those with the added benefit of a showroom, utilise it. Displaying a broad eclectic mix of furniture in one place means your clients can try out their variations before they take them home.
Dropship accounts are the perfect way to offer your clients an abundance of choice when it comes to their furniture, without having to hold stock. For smaller, independent businesses, start-ups and singularly online retailers the dropshipping market eradicates the need for a large storage facility. Dropshipping handily removes the middle man, delivering products directly from wholesaler to the end-user with ease.
Whilst variety is important, you want to be certain that your product can be collated into stylish variations. A more subtle option is to offer your customers six of the same chair in a variety of colours, using the style of chair to form cohesion throughout the collection.
Alternatively, you can reverse this idea by marketing six different dining chairs in the same colour. This option is great if your clients have a decisive colour scheme throughout the room that needs carrying through into the dining set.
Photography credit to Pinterest.
Encourage your clients to develop a design scheme for the whole room first, especially those with kitchen-diners. The organised chaos that works so well around your dining table is overwhelming when applied to the whole room. Use the design scheme or statement features such as the dining table and kitchen cabinets that have already been implemented in the room to educate decisions about which chairs to use. The table itself, in particular, is a great indicator of the kind of materials that might be used for seating, a marble top, for instance, may not lend itself so easily to wooden chairs.
Mismatched dining is exciting because it’s both slightly chaotic and yet cohesive. Everyone likes to add a bit of disorder to their life and with mismatched dining, there are almost no stringent rules. Except for one. The singular rule to stick to is to keep your chair heights consistent. If your customers are mixing bench seating with individual chairs or stools, it’s always worth checking that the seat height is the same. Nobody wants to be the person perched on a pedestal at a dinner party, blocking the flow of conversation between the guests sat either side of them.
Ultimately, these stylish features still need to serve their intended purpose: to be comfortable for dining, and if they make the dining experience feel socially awkward then they certainly aren’t achieving that purpose.