Why Do the Designer Booths at China's Biggest Furniture Fair Look So Shabby? Is This Generation of Designers Just Not Good Enough?

Small and cluttered — that is the impression the designer section of this year's China International Furniture Fair leaves you with. How did it get this way?

This was the second year the independent furniture brand Fanji took part in the China International Furniture Fair. They thought their booth was too small.

The one thing that made up for it was the location: the booth faced straight onto the entrance of the DOD (Design of Designers) hall. So they put a gray sofa at the visual center and hung books, tables and chairs — the 2016 Mantis Chair among them — an upside-down plant and a stopped clock from the roof beams, until the whole booth looked like an art installation.

Yu Qin, who handles marketing for Fanji, explained the display as "something to play with." "Honestly, we weren't that keen on coming this year, because last year didn't work out especially well. But the booth location this year was unusual… we drew up a few proposals, and this is the one we wanted to show. So we came."

You could also explain the display as squeezing value out of every inch of space, and that would hold up too: if all those chairs had been set on the floor, visitors would not have had room to turn around. Yu Qin hoped consumers who saw the installation would "come take photos, post them to Moments or whatever," which would do the job of publicity — the main reason for showing up at all.

Fanji was not the only one with a shrunken booth. Zhiyin and Muzhi Workshop, two familiar faces at the Shanghai show, were in the same position. Exhibitors in the DOD section who could take 3 or 4 booths in past years got two at most this year, and most of the newer independent design brands got just one. If you have come to the furniture fair for several years running, the strongest impression this year is "small" and "packed." The busier booths were full of people, and the DOD hall, the one that draws the most young visitors, most of all.

For many visitors, the difference between Hall W and the DOD hall is the difference between big brands and independent ones. For designers, Hall W means a large exhibiting bill — a bigger booth runs upward of 700,000 to 800,000 yuan for a single show. DOD is far cheaper: 7,500 yuan per booth.

The organizer, Shanghai Bohua Exhibition Co., calls that price "within what designers can accept." Selling booth space is Bohua's main business. The China International Furniture Fair covers 350,000 square meters and splits into halls by product category and tier — a hall for dining tables and chairs, a hall for classical furniture, a hall for office furniture. Like Hall W, these are commercial halls, which means higher booth fees, higher advertising fees and higher build-out costs for exhibitors.

DOD is the incubator of the operation. Zhu Zhirui, the sales manager for the DOD section, said: "If you know what the rent is at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre, you know DOD doesn't actually make money. Compared with our peers — Design Shanghai, say — a single booth there costs at least 7 or 8 times what ours does."

Zhong Beihong, Bohua's deputy general manager, said the company has put more than 5 million yuan into the DOD section over the past four years.

More and more original design brands want to squeeze in. In 2015 the DOD section had fewer than 120 exhibitors; in 2016 it had 167, and the organizer turned the parking garage next door into extra exhibition space.

Quantity has not brought quality. Dang Xinyu, founder of Tiaoshi Studio, said: "As more small brands come in, the product design gets pretty homogeneous." Zhao Lei, CEO of Muzhi Workshop, said: "(The hall feels small because) more and more brands are exhibiting, everybody wants in, and there's no room." Unable to show enough products, Zhao Lei is thinking about moving to Hall W in 2017.

This fair, which lists the China National Furniture Association as one of its organizers, is close to a miniature of Chinese furniture manufacturing.

Like much of Chinese manufacturing, furniture companies here used cheap labor to export, working as OEMs and ODMs (an ODM contracts out design as well as production, but both are white-label work — the manufacturer does not own the brand). That built up capital for expansion fast and secured the country's place as the world's factory. The China International Furniture Fair started in 1993 and became a standalone show in 1997. At first it "opened the door to the Chinese market for European furniture," but from 2000 it turned itself into an export-driven show.

That position began to wobble after the 2008 financial crisis. Squeezed by weak demand in Europe and the United States and by anti-dumping rules, export growth slowed, and the industry started trying to come home and build brands of its own. As the industry's biggest annual showcase, the China International Furniture Fair became the biggest force behind the formula "export-driven, high-end domestic sales." That means sales-driven companies with little real grasp of how Chinese consumers live still make up a large share of the exhibitors — even though the fair's reputation has improved in recent years through its support for original design brands.

Original design brands, design studios and independent designers come to the fair for a few reasons. Independent design brands like Unexpected Design and Xishan want to meet as many distributors and buyers as they can. Brands like Bentu, Fanji, Tiaoshi Studio and Chengshe Bamboo Living say they come mainly to show new products and raise their profile. A third group, represented by Zhou Chenchen Design Studio and Mario Tsai Studio, does not exhibit as a brand at all, but as a studio looking for design-service work with brands.

Unexpected Design took two booths totaling about 18 square meters, with a plain display of its Time stationery line and a new desk clock. Compared with most of the furniture brands at the fair, these small objects drew heavy traffic — people liked picking them up and turning them over, or asking the price. But according to founder Huang Guodong, it is still hard at a domestic show to turn contact with visitors into business; only a handful of the approaches were about custom corporate gifts.

Cai Liechao, founder of Mario Tsai Studio, said: "We exhibit for two main reasons. First, to show brands and companies what we can do as designers. Second, to reach professional buyers, high-end interior designers, design enthusiasts and so on."

That ideal of what a trade fair should be has long been the norm at the top shows, the Milan Furniture Fair or Paris's Maison & Objet. Young designers there usually start out circulating through the off-site shows, networking as they go, promoting themselves through galleries and the press, looking for work with furniture companies to build experience, and finally bringing their own brand into the main show. The greatest asset those fairs have is a mature base of buyers, media and distributors.

Just last week, Huang Guodong took his 2016 products to the autumn edition of the Paris fair. The show felt a little quiet because of security worries in Europe, but the people who came knew what they were after — buyers from big department stores like Lane Crawford, operators of museum gift shops, buyers for design boutiques. "They come to pick goods and place orders. It's extremely efficient," Huang Guodong said.

A shortage of professional buyers and of distributors at every tier may be the weakest point of the China International Furniture Fair — and of the Chinese furniture industry as a whole. Ideally, varied consumer demand produces a varied market, and distributors — furniture concept stores, brand showrooms — read the trends and the demand, which in turn helps more brands find the consumers they are looking for.

Today's Chinese furniture market looks instead like a permanent version of the China International Furniture Fair. Companies such as Red Star Macalline and Jisheng Weibang are, at bottom, in the real-estate business of renting out floor space, and the space is filled with identical furniture disconnected from what people actually buy. Younger buyers, after more flexible design and faster answers, have gone to furniture e-commerce sites or to independent brands' own showrooms.

Over the four days of this year's Shanghai show, attendance came close to 120,000 visits, up 17.75% from last year. But as Yu Qin put it, "It felt like there were more consumers in the last two days, and a lot of them were there for the show." Huang Guodong agreed: "The overwhelming majority are ordinary people who came to look. There are very few resources or channels you can actually connect with. It feels a bit like a retail bazaar."

That said, meetings with distributors, large companies or buyers do happen at the Shanghai show.

Zhou Chenchen, a fixture at every kind of exhibition for the past two years, is the obvious example. He showed his own independent work at fairs to get attention and find partners, then put out furniture lines with the well-known brands HC28 and ACF HOME, and took on a project upgrading the brand identity system for Qumei.

Tong Hao, founder of Xishan Workshop, also thinks the fair is worth it. "For an original design brand just starting out, the furniture fair is still a decent platform, because it has enough traffic and enough attention." He said that bringing this year's new Mystic Realm series to the show brought nearly 300,000 yuan in retail sales in a single day, with several hotel projects under discussion.

Beyond that, almost no designer was optimistic about sales. A representative of Chengshe Bamboo Living said: "The fair doesn't do much for the brand's own sales."

Some designer brands set no expectations at all. Liu Jiaqi, from Bentu's promotion department, said that whatever the size of the booth, the fair is worth doing as long as it promotes the brand. Bentu's signature material is concrete, which ordinary people do not know well, so the brand relies mostly on people inside the industry to spread the word. Coming to this fair is a way to reach consumers who are not professionals.

Among most of the design brands QDaily interviewed, two words kept coming up: "tone" and "self-media."

Fanji, which has more than 40,000 followers on its WeChat official account, sees itself as a lifestyle publication. Columns such as "Fanji at Home" and "Fanji Drops In" are real interviews with customers who have bought its products, about their homes and their lives, and they drive product sales and attention for the brand.

Muzhi Workshop, on Weibo since 2010, has more than 250,000 followers there, and its Douban site has nearly 30,000 members. According to Zhao Lei, "In the early days, Weibo did draw a lot of attention from media and industry people."

Huang Guodong has come around to the same view: "Doing self-media well, or having partners who can, still makes a fairly big difference to a brand's momentum and reach." Unexpected Design now has close to 50,000 followers on Weibo, and not long ago he registered a brand account on Instagram. This year the brand also worked with Luoji Siwei's WeChat store; in 10 months online it sold 11,528 units of its "Craftsman's Pen." Zhiyin has a similar arrangement with the video outlet Yitiao.

None of them object to using a platform like the China International Furniture Fair for wider exposure. But as a business model, a brand like Fanji is in fundamental conflict with a trade fair.

Designer brands are not mass-manufactured trade brands: their output is limited. Fanji is after the buyers who genuinely understand furniture and value what it makes, and it prices accordingly. "A lot of the questions we get are strange — people ask if they can buy wholesale, and people looking for distribution come by, but that's not the route our brand wants to take," Yu Qin said. "They ask whether we can sell it to them after the show. But we don't sell it. Once it's sold, we don't have it anymore."

Other designer brands are still growing into a style of their own. Tiaoshi Studio, founded in Hangzhou in 2015, said: "Product quality and a sense of design are what matter most right now. We don't need that much traffic yet."

Outside competition keeps rising. The Shanghai International Furniture Expo, which moved north from Guangzhou to the Hongqiao exhibition center last year, and Design Shanghai, run by the British exhibition company Media 10, have both pulled away some of the attention the Shanghai furniture fair used to get. The Shanghai International Furniture Expo, which runs at the same time and competes head-on, hung a large poster inside the Huamu Road subway station that visitors pass through on their way to the Shanghai show.

Bentu, for instance, set up booths at both the Pudong show and the Hongqiao show this year. Suyuan, a Chinese-style handmade furniture brand that used to exhibit in Hall W5, decided Hall W's fees were too high and took only a small DOD booth showing three or four pieces — then got an invitation from the Hongqiao show's organizers to take a larger booth there, free, with room for 20 pieces.

Zhu Zhirui put part of this year's small, cluttered DOD hall down to a generational shift: "When brands like Bentu, Zhiyin and Muzhi Workshop first exhibited at DOD, they were exactly where these small exhibitors are now. They all grew step by step."

But he also said: "We can't deny the weight of the industry as a whole — original design is only a very small slice of it. Plenty of companies do both export and domestic sales, and that is really what the whole industry lives on. Asking every furniture factory to stick to original design the way DOD's designers do isn't realistic right now. Factories have to survive, and they still need to make money."

Image credits: Unexpected Design, Fanji's Weibo, the official website of the China International Furniture Fair, Bentu's Weibo, Xishan Workshop's Weibo, on-site photography