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Notes From NeoCon 2006, Part Deux: The Dynamic Duo Survives The Show (just barely)

So NeoCon’s been done for just over a month now. Our blisters have healed and we’ve waded through all the marketing brochures we dragged home in our over-weight-limit suitcases (darn those airlines and their rules!). Here’s our final say on what caught our fancy at the show.

Click on the player below to hear our in-depth podcast ramblings about the products described below.*

http://odeo.com/audio/1564837/view”>powered by ODEO

Laminates, Sims & ZoomRooms, Oh My!

We saw so many varieties of laminate and vinyl flooring – who knew you could do so much with it” One manufacture of luxury vinyl flooring is Halo Floors™, owned and operated by MaryDocker. We chatted with Ms. Docker – a dynamic individual who is very student-friendly. We hope to feature her in P&C soon.

Tricycle is an exciting company, leading the way in finding ways to reduce waste and create sustainable design in the interiors industry. Among other things, they’ve curated a book called reverb, which features 10 essays on where the industry currently stands regarding sustainability. The amazing product we saw demonstrated is SIM from Tricycle™, the new way to spec carpet using digitally printed images combining CAD and color imagery to give a dramatically realistic paper sample result. No, really! These are not those useless paper samples of the past. You can use SIMs as an eco-friendly way to narrow down your choices before ordering those final few actual carpet samples at decision time. Flooring companies that use this sampling method include Nood Carpets and Bentley Prince Street, among many others.

The ZoomRoom™! Also from Tricycle, this is the most amazing way to “virtually” see your carpet choices in a variety of simulated 3-D room settings before you make those high-dollar decisions. We saw it demonstrated by Steve Patterson at the Bentley Prince Street showroom and were floored! (sorry, couldn’t resist)

Marketing Magic

There’s a plethora of showrooms located outside of Chicago’s Merchandise Mart on Wells, Hubbard, and the surrounding streets. And let us tell ya, they work it to get people to come out of the Mart and over to their showrooms by offering free breakfasts, lunches, and happy hours, among other marketing magic. And, well, let’s face it, if there’s free food, the P&C Duo is there.

Geiger International threw a beautiful breakfast and thereby sucked us into their showroom on Hubbard Street for a tour. They were feeding us, after all. Geiger designs and manufactures beautiful wood furniture for executive offices, lobbies, reception areas, and conference rooms. Virginia Fenton, a Geiger rep from Dallas gave us the scoop on their gorgeous new wood color options and their new chair, the Foray™ – a feature-rich, task-oriented chair with great-looking executive chair styling.

Interior Design Magazine sponsors NeoCon SELECT – a group of exhibitors who all offered the opportunity to win a Segway in daily drawings by dropping off a business card in their showroom. The more of the SELECT showrooms you visited, the better your chances of winning one of the three Segways up for grabs. Giving away prizes like iPods is also a popular marketing method to suck you into showrooms. Maybe one of us will be lucky enough to win something one of these years…

KI, the commercial furniture company based in Wisconsin, set itself apart from the rest of the showrooms by creating a whole stylized look, a la Roy Lichtenstein’s spotted comic-strip style, that included huge mural graphics in the showroom and models dressed in 40s-style costumes at all of the Mart’s entrances offering attendees a chance to win a trip to Milwaukee, WI and the Milwaukee Art Museum. Why Milwaukee you ask” Because in a stroke of marketing genius, KI had tied this whole theme up into one perfectly complete package – the museum is currently running a special exhibition, Masters of American Comics about comic book art. It all came together so brilliantly! Great job, KI!

Home Sweet Home

And lastly, we noticed the influence of the residential look and feel in many of the designs we saw for healthcare, commercial, and corporate environments. This can help patients and visitors feel more comfortable in hospitals, employees be more productive at the office and generally enhance the experience of any environment.

By the way, the Mart has several floors of residential showrooms, including the gorgeous, and we do mean, GORGEOUS, William Switzer & Associates. ASID hosted lunch for members in this sumptious showroom. Always on the hunt for food, we stopped in. Glad we did – it’s luxurious goodness, William Switzer is. Thanks for having us!