The final installment of season three of the HomePage News InSight Trend Index examines the seemingly divergent tracks of sustainability and the saving of time, space and effort.
But if we learned anything from three seasons of InSight curator, author and trend advisor Tom Mirabile’s scouring of home and housewares trade shows across the globe for new and compelling products that embody key lifestyle trends, it’s that trends don’t exist in their own respective bubbles. And they evolve in harmony.
So as the latest edition of InSight — Home + Housewares Heatmap — explores the latest generation of products touting environmental responsibility and added convenience, look for the connective tissue that unites different categories into compelling whole-home lifestyle stories that can change the way consumers think of this industry.
Every single product in this edition of InSight shares the admirable objective to improve people’s lives.
As for sustainability, we see an increasing movement by the industry to make eco-friendly benefits a core of just about every product in development. The key objective is to satisfy growing consumer expectations for these factors (and to compel more consumer demand for them) without compromising the primary values of performance, style, affordability, and durability.
Such primary values are the same for products that save time, space and effort, three ease-of-living cornerstones of the housewares industry foundation. These traits continue to evolve to suit fluid lifestyle priorities, as is evident from the products in this edition of InSight. In most cases, if a housewares product idea doesn’t save time, space or effort, it has little chance of becoming a housewares product reality. Imagine the trifecta of a product that does all three?
The industry still has some work to do to cement sustainability into that foundation. It can happen, though, if the industry keeps everything connected… in harmony.
