Furniture Culture

Until April 17, Milan will be the center of the world for all things concerning furniture and design. The 55th edition of the Salone del Mobile opens at the Milan Trade Fair and over 1,000 events will be held all over the city, including the hip Fuorisalone, in order to attract operators, professionals, reporters from all over the globe. 300,000 people are forecasted to attend the fair, 30% from abroad. The weekend, when also the general public is admitted, will see a peak with over 30,000 visitors walking around the stands of designers and manufacturers from Italy and the rest of the planet.

The entire economic value added to the city's economy is not easy to gauge, but for Milanese hotel owners, restaurateurs, and cab drivers the Salone is a bonanza: it has become the most important event for business tourism, since the fashion industry has decided to focus more on deals and less on shows and events. From the perspective of the Italu furniture industry things are less rosy, though: growth in 2015 was anemic and the road to recover is long. Since 2010, consumption has dropped by 35% (-€4.7 billion), with exports only partly countering the trend with +16% (€1.5 billion). From the point of view of retailing, the situation is even more critical, since the drop in domestic consumption has occurred amid a major expansion of big chains. Ikea alone increased revenues by 10% over the same time period in Italy, attaining a market share of 11%. So either considering manufacturers or retailers, the situation of the Italian furniture industry is precarious.

However, there are growing demand segments which Italian firms are unable to intercept, such as supplying the international market for office and residential buildings. Global market size for provisioning the building industry is hard to estimate with precision, but it's probably larger than the retail market for furniture. In Italy, it accounts for only a few percentage points. The difficulties encountered by Italian firms are more cultural than structural: they have to make the shift from fix pricing to offers based on costs for production batches, from product management to project management, from product to service. The challenge is to embrace new business models which require different organizational solutions and professional profiles. Cultural change is the hardest change of all. The Italian furniture industry is the end product of its history and the history and culture of its actors. If the industry is to climb back to higher market positions, it cannot wait for the golden years to return, because they might never. Changing the culture of companies is hard but feasible: who will lead the change? Also for the organizers of Salone del Mobile, the moment has come to answer this question.