High Point Market Recap: Color, Craftsmanship & Custom Tech
Hosted by Jenna Gaidusek. A fall market debrief with Lauren Scully, recorded live from the Loft the week after High Point.
Jenna and Lauren don't do market like most designers. They don't book a lot of product appointments with reps. They meet with people, talk about solutions, and pay attention to where design and technology are headed. Here's their week, start to finish.
Remember when they first started going to market together and everything was beige, brown, and gray? Lauren calls it the gray takeover. This time, pattern and color are back, and things are getting playful again.
But the bigger thing they noticed was a split in how products are being sold.
- Brands explaining why the price point is what it is
- Kiln-dried frames, made in America, real construction details
- The sofa you'll still love in ten years
- Inexpensive, trendy, and now very colorful
- Mostly lamps, little tables, and accessories
- Lauren's take: the impulse-buy aisle at checkout. Still useful, just different.
Between budgets, imports, and some big catalog brands not holding up the way people hoped, clients are paying more attention to quality. Jenna had at least three conversations with designers who are now walking clients through which pieces to replace and why the new ones are better.
They also saw kitchen and cabinetry everywhere, in Showplace and IHFC, as market keeps growing its partnerships with kitchen and bath brands.
Clients want a piece they can talk about at a dinner party, not the same catalog look as every house on the street. Knowing who sketched it, how it was made, and how it ended up in the room turns a purchase into a statement piece, and eventually an heirloom. Lauren heard more conversations about antiques at this market than any before.
At Amadi Collective, that showed up as a whole space of artisans and makers under one roof: wallpaper, paint, art, and rugs. And at Tinker, in about five minutes, Jenna found exactly the kind of collected pieces she means:
Jenna noticed something different in this season's recaps. Fewer "look, I went to High Point" posts, which never get much traction outside the industry, and more posts that explain what market means for clients. Most people have no idea it's the biggest furniture show in the industry, or that it's a whole town. Here's the checklist from this episode:
- Call it what it is. Explain that you went to the biggest furniture show in the industry, not just "market."
- Educate on the price point. Show why one sofa costs more than another and how long each one will last.
- Go to the source. Visit a plant on the outskirts of town and share how things get made.
- Show your face. With so much AI content online, being a real person on camera is how you stand out.
- Bring a B-roll person. If you don't think to film transitions and building entrances, bring someone on your team who does.
- Keep it human. A handwritten note still gets picked up first, even after an AI talk.
This was the theme of every talk Jenna gave at market. For years, designers had to shape their business to fit inside someone else's software. In her one-on-ones, she keeps finding people paying per seat for project management tools they use one feature of. One person only used the time tracker.
The AI Social Club is Jenna's own version of this. She didn't want to piecemeal tools together, so hosting, live broadcasts, classes, and payments are all in one place, laid out as a floor plan because she's a designer. Her demos of the Fabric to Frame app in the AI App Studio were a hit at market, and conversations with brands about prototyping faster are already turning into new apps.
Jenna is the go-to educator for design professionals who want to use technology without losing their creative edge. A designer turned tech advocate, she is a nationally recognized speaker, podcast host, community builder, and custom app builder based in Charleston, SC.
At Fall High Point Market she taught a CEU at Hooker Furnishings, spoke on the panel at Amadi Collective, and ran fully booked one-on-ones at Howard Elliott.
Lauren and Jenna have worked together since Jenna lived in Indianapolis. Lauren comes from both the design industry and the software side, helped build eDesign Tribe, and went with it to the project management software company that acquired it.
Now they're back building together. At market she was behind the camera, capturing B-roll and helping with the live broadcasts.
The Loft is the upstairs live stage inside the AI Social Club. Podcast recordings happen there on select Fridays at 11:00 AM ET, and every live date is posted in the Classroom calendar.
The edited episode publishes Saturday mornings to podcast platforms and YouTube.
Disclaimer: This blog was written using AI as a recap from the recording then edited by the author for accuracy and details.