NEW YORK, New York — Business is up over the last fiscal year for art buyers, interior designers and 300 other exhibitors at the 26th annual Surtex exhibition, an annual trade show for the surface design industry held each year at the Jacob K. Javits Center in New York City. 

Nearly 6,000 manufacturers, retailers and marketers walked the floor over the three-day event, a 30-percent increase over last year. The attendees were part of a larger, global retail market worth an estimated $147 billion, according to EPM Communications. 

Penny Sikalis, vice president of GLM Shows, which hosted the event, reported a more noticeable thirst this year for three points of interest: information on licensing, the business of product development and how to best negotiate with manufacturers.  Linda McDonald booth: Ashley Morgan, left; Tom Mirabile, Art Buyer; Hugh Biber, Design/Creative Director and two representatives

“People wanted to have a much better understanding for how art is sourced and turned into a product, from start to finish, and how the process is looked at from a global perspective,” she said.   

She also pointed out that although the show brought in attendees from virtually every State in the USA, there were also 49 countries represented at the expo, which accounted for over a fifth of the exhibitors. The growing list of countries, she said, is “an indicator of the need for more product development, innovation and artwork globally.”

To that end, Surtex debuted a trend theatre this year, giving attendees the opportunity to hear seventeen half-hour talks from nine trend experts throughout the United States and Europe. Nicki Gondell, principal of Trend House, gave a seminar on styling home décor with the latest fabrics and colors. Emmanuelle Linard, executive director of Edelkoort, spoke about ways to identify trends before they’re spotted by the mainstream.

One of the exhibitors, Nancy Fire, co-founded New York-based Design Works International with her husband, Neil Breslau and both attended the show to broaden their services. They currently provide corporations with trend forecasting reports as well as hand painted and CAD designs for surface and packaging. 

“We find that a lot of large corporations have PR and advertising but we are in the middle to help them with design, suggest product categories, trend direction and help them shop the market domestically and internationally,” said Breslau. “The companies that are doing well now are the ones that are investing money again in design and product. People don’t want to buy the same thing year after year.”

Fire has been busy over the past year working with HGTV Home as their Design Director for all HOME categories. She has focused specifically on curating HGTV HOME Collections for furniture (case goods and accent pieces), custom upholstered furniture, lighting, area rugs and flooring, paint, wallpaper and their newest collection of fabrics, which will launch early in 2013. Several well-known brands are associated with the HGTV Home collection, including Bassett for its Open Market Furniture Collection and ELK for table lamps, floor lamps and ceiling fixtures. 

“Once you farm out the product, there’s a lot that’s lost in both service and design,” Fire said. “We want to keep the love at home as much as possible.”

“We’d love to keep everything in the good ol’ U.S. but a lot of times that’s not realistic,” Breslau added. “The main reason is cost, but if you ask the bulk of our clientele, they’d prefer to stay local, too.” 

The company has ten designers in New York as well as a team of five salespeople. They work from a 10,000-square-foot loft in midtown New York. The couple also have a 70,000 square-foot production facility in Vernon, Calif. for the sister company, First-to-Print, which prints digitally on fabric.

Over her three days at the show, Fire said there’s “definitely an appetite to buy again and people are savvier than ever.” 

Her husband, Neil, handles the business side of the company. He said there have been years where apparel is strong, but in recent years home product has accounted for 65-percent of the company’s annual revenue. He estimates a 15-percent growth for the company over the last fiscal year. 

Sandra Nunes, a Brit in Brooklyn, operates a much smaller shop, Collecting Colour, and attended Surtex for the first time this year. Her company, comprised of eight freelance designers and an intern, specializes in concept, pattern and embellishment design for a number of applications including home furnishings. 

She launched Collecting Colour this past year and said she’s generating “just over $100 thousand” this year.

Previously, she had designed for years in the fashion industry, having worked on everything from apparel for Victoria’s Secret to packaging for Bath & Body Works. “I met a lot of home furnishings clients through fashion who were looking for bedding and I noticed a whole untapped market,” she said. “There’s really no studio in the market that does fabric manipulation and embellishment. They’re desperate for it. The fashion world understands it. It’s an easy market. The home fashion industry is trying to make things more special and new.”

In fashion, she said, there’s a high turnover of prints and you can charge a lot for less product. In home furnishings, she noticed by comparison, you can charge twice as much and the product, though slower to catch on with buyers at first, is much more stable in the long run. 

Nunes said she sells the copyright, not the yardage. All of her designs are digitally printed, so that when the buyer purchases it from her studio, the buyer owns the rights to it. 

“It’s a fashion mentality,” she said. “It’s my roots.”