The Year's Biggest Furniture Fair Opens: 15 Takeaways on the Push to Go Younger

Few brands stand out. Most original furniture design here is steady — or, put another way, similar.

The DOD design show — the full name is a mouthful, the China International Designer Exhibition and Trade Fair (Design of Designer) — is a section the China International Furniture Fair, already running for close to 20 years, created in 2012 to promote original Chinese furniture design.

Behind that not-very-marketable name sits a small picture of how original Chinese furniture design has grown up.

On one side, the DOD show gives the independent domestic furniture brands and designers that have emerged in recent years a route to market. On the other, it gives ordinary consumers — especially the fast-growing young ones — a place to get to know homegrown original furniture brands.

In 2017, DOD drew more than 300 designers and over 200 design brands, the largest edition yet. For the first time it moved to its own venue, the Shanghai World Expo Exhibition & Convention Center. Outside the DOD show, more than 100 original design brands stayed behind at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre, along with more trade-oriented exhibitors chasing an "export-led, high-end domestic sales" strategy.

We chose original design as our lens on the country's largest annual furniture fair. You can watch lumbering big companies hunt for an opening through young sub-brands, and independent design brands, gradually maturing, try out a wider design vocabulary.

Big brands tend to play it safe on design

The brand design hall and the original design hall have both been crowded for years now, and a few booths have a genuine "internet-famous" pull — Suke Home, Qumei Home, U+.

Suke Home's booth was under crowd control almost all day; passersby, curious, joined the long line anyway. Inside Qumei's booth it was hard to find anywhere to sit at all: sofas, armchairs, benches, even the edges of beds were full of people asking prices, asking about materials, or simply sitting down to feel the piece and rest their feet.

Unless you work in the industry, or know these brands very well, it is hard to tell which pieces on display are new, or how this year's series differs from last year's. These solid, finely finished solid-wood pieces turn up at the fair year after year; a small breakthrough in form here, a small refinement of a decorative detail there, and little of it sticks in the mind.

From what we saw and heard on site, these brands aim at an older audience: over 40, with money to spend. Take Qumei's new Fanxi Living Hall series this year. By the company's own description, it is made for the "light-luxury set" — people who, as spending power rises, care about the texture of daily life and are happy to pay for refined design and a high-end, comfortable feel. Visitors describing Qumei, U+ and Suke mostly reached for the same words: "grand," "looks classy," "really good quality."

But these big brands, conservative as their design looks to us, are also the companies that spend a million yuan and up — sometimes several million — on booth construction every year, and that consumers recognize instantly.

Qumei, which listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2015, is one example. After publishing its first- and second-quarter results this year, the company said both its average transaction value and its conversion rate had risen sharply. First-half revenue came to 882 million yuan, up 29.73% year on year, with net profit up 45.6%.

Good numbers may explain why these big brands stay continuous and cautious in their design. If their core customers already trust the products, they have no reason to gamble on sweeping design changes just to court a young crowd that cannot yet afford much.

The compromise: launch a younger sub-brand

Figures published by Iyiou Think Tank in its "Age Distribution of Home Furnishing and Building Materials Consumers, 2010-2017" report show that in 2010, consumers aged 27 and under made up less than 10% of the total; this year, that same age group accounts for nearly 40% of buyers across all ages.

The mainstream consumer base is drifting younger, and what young buyers want from home-furnishing brands, styles and services is growing more varied. Yet for years the market for original domestic furniture brands has been held by a set of big brands that favor bulk and the "New Chinese Style" concept. Moreless, Pingze, U+ and others that set the tone for "New Chinese Style" started up around 2008; after that, traditional furniture companies such as Qumei and Zuoyou rolled out their Wanwu and Qiankun series. Chinese furniture went through a change you could see everywhere, as big brands — whether or not they had ever made whole-house sets — nearly all crossed over to launch their own reading of "New Chinese Style."

That wave is still running, but it is drifting further and further from the young market. One fact is hard to ignore: the buying power of the younger generation, now in the middle of its first home purchases, with steadily rising demand for furniture that is flexible and useful.

So sub-brands have become the standard way to experiment with "going younger."

Ronglin, founded in 2000, started developing its own original furniture lines as early as 2007. The Binglang, Jingci and Wutong series it released one after another were all built, essentially, around "New Chinese Style."

At this year's show, Ronglin Home launched an entirely new brand, Liangchen, working with Zhou Chenchen, an independent designer who has made a name for himself at home over the past two years, under the slogan "blend the East, simplify the design." Judging by the products, it reads as minimalist furniture pitched at a traditional customer — traces of Nordic simplicity, but no energy.

Suyuan Furniture, founded in 2011, was filed under "New Chinese Style" from the start. Next to the many New Chinese Style brands that turn the product itself into a symbol, Suyuan's design language is less cluttered; it redesigned Chinese furniture around how people actually live now, stripping the style back out.

For this show, Suyuan brought a younger furniture brand, Liwu, built for the small apartments young Chinese live in. The design is open and loose, so every piece can be combined at will — from storage cabinets, TV consoles and sideboards down to a single drawer or stool — all meant to suit different floor plans and the messy realities of daily use, and to enter young people's lives in a more flexible, practical way.

"Suyuan leans toward the cultural side. We've invested something of ourselves in Suyuan, trying to use the brand to carry a Chinese flavor and an Eastern spirit — art exhibitions, the four arts of the zither, go, calligraphy and painting, things tied to traditional Chinese culture. That's what Suyuan has always done," founder Wu Wei told us. "But another very important group is young people. We like them too, but doing that inside the Suyuan brand comes with a lot of limits." That was his starting point for Liwu.

It isn't only these traditional solid-wood brands. Bentu Design, an independent design brand founded in 2012, brought a new brand this year too: Buzao, a spinoff of Bentu's Henmei series.

Bentu Design, which won a niche audience with its cement products, digs into the particular grain and texture of different materials and turns them into things we can use every day; its attention sits on the material itself.

The person running the Buzao booth told us the Henmei series concentrates on natural stone, but that during development the team came to feel the sensibility behind it was strong enough to carry a brand of its own. So they pulled it out to stand alone — not tied to one material, but a "spirit" brand meant for a new generation of young people focused on themselves, aimed at a narrower slice of the market.

Among the new designer brands, few break out

At this year's DOD show, besides the 200-plus brands, large and small, lined up along "DOD Avenue" — a stretch dressed up to look like a real street — 18 lifestyle stores turned up as pop-ups, reinforcing the neighborhood idea.

Wanli Shuxiang, working from the theme "Cozy Corner," shrank the open, mixed-use space it runs inside Réel Department Store down to a booth at the Expo hall. AND Coffee, the juice shop FRESHIGH and the J-flower flower-arranging studio joined forces under the theme "Modern Station" to build one concept lifestyle store, dressing a neighborhood rest stop in flowers while serving hand-brewed coffee and fresh juice on site. Hengshan · Heji put up a "Modern Starry Sky" lifestyle store in the hall and brought along pieces by the Dutch design brand droog design. And the booth of Boluo Banma Home Guide went full Instagram: flamingos, metal shelving frames, blush-pink cacti.

Those were the organizers' experiments with staging. Brand by brand, the approaches differ too.

Lost & Found, a DOD regular, is one. Its new series this time, "#By the Door · Picture Diary," included entryway cabinets, entryway stools, coat racks, full-length mirrors and hooks — all built around the indoor ritual of getting ready to leave the house. Taking that as its cue, the brand built an actual entryway on site and annotated it in comic-strip form, which was good fun.

But the clearest impression from walking DOD this year, quality aside, is how many more new faces there are. And yet, whether you look at brand tone or furniture form, you may find you cannot tell them apart. The number of new brands is rising; the number with a recognizable, distinct style is not.

Raw-wood furniture is still where many brands start. Mumo, founded seven years ago, was among the first to make it, selling mostly through a Taobao shop, with plain, unfussy wooden furnishings. Today, besides the design center at its Wenzhou headquarters, it runs two furniture showrooms called Xinzao, in Hangzhou and Shanghai.

Unlike the other exhibitors, Mumo moved an entire home onto the show floor. Lin Jingjing, who heads Mumo's marketing department, said they built the whole booth out of wood, floor and walls included, and that the material will be recycled once the fair ends. She hopes visitors get to know the brand starting from the booth — "it's consistent with who we are."

But one lap of the DOD show turns up plenty of products that look a lot like Mumo's. A designer from another brand, who did not want to be named, put it this way: "Brands that created a style early on have now become the ones whose style got taken from them."

Bai Ni, a Hangzhou designer and the founder of the pet-furniture brand HOOI, sees the solid-wood craze differently. Working in Europe taught her that Europe is no longer so keen on it — "look at HAY, plenty of its products are engineered board." Composite materials, in her view, are more stable, don't warp, and once faced with linoleum are quite waterproof; in use they simply perform better.

Chinese consumers and manufacturers, though, still put their faith in solid wood, mainly because the glue in domestic composite boards still raises environmental worries, which gave the material a bad name. "Even with solid wood, expensive doesn't mean good. Look at what's been done to walnut prices," Bai Ni said.

Still, a few brands are making something new out of the same crowded solid-wood field. Twelve Hours Slow, another brand built mostly on walnut and ash, was founded only last year by four people who crossed over from advertising, and both its eye and its read on how young people live now feel its own — which may have something to do with those advertising-creative backgrounds.

One of its new pieces is a multifunctional sideboard that can also serve as a pantry or tea cabinet. Folding sliding doors save the space a swinging door needs; the large shelving unit can be configured around what you actually have to store; assorted dividers keep categories separate and the contents tidy; and there is a removable waterproof flannel liner at the bottom.

There is also a large decorative round mirror for a bathroom, hallway, entryway or stairwell; slide the mirror aside and a shelf appears behind it for everyday items or ornaments. One object, several uses.

WUU, the independent design brand from Xiamen that drew so much attention with its T Series lighting, brought an entirely new lighting series, Planet STARGAZER. It is not confined to lighting a room: the atmosphere and decoration matter more here. Much as a planet reflects sunlight, the main light source bounces off a reflective flat surface into an even, diffused glow, reaching for something more poetic and still.

The new trends you can see all come down to materials

Zhiyin, a brand that has always been warm and easy to like, drew a lot of "didn't see that coming" reactions with its new Living Well series. The heavy use of metal and waterproof fabric breaks with how Zhiyin usually works.

The Summer Leaf coffee table, for instance, fuses a waterproof fabric once used for clothing into the tabletop, so no tablecloth is needed: the surface resists water and stains on its own, and looks and feels as soft as cloth. Fold the fabric up at the table's edge and it becomes a lip that keeps things from rolling off. The Free Cabinet, inspired by a banana leaf, has a body folded from a single sheet of translucent metal. The Van Gogh Ladder Rack combines solid wood and metal, with a mirror hanging on the right that swivels to different heights so you can see all of yourself.

Zhiyin founder Zhu Hui told us the Living Well series grew out of the Shanghai flagship store, Zhiyin Living Hall, which opened at the end of May. It got the team thinking about furniture for public spaces and made them want to try different approaches, using metal's durability, thinness and color to run experiments less bound by material. "In the past, if we could use either wood or metal, we'd probably have chosen wood. This time we let go a bit more and stopped agonizing over the material — where metal fit, we used metal, without wondering whether we should swap in wood."

Benlai Design, a Hangzhou brand that develops wood, bamboo and ceramic products, came this time with its paper brand, Zhiyinni, whose name opens with the word for paper. As the name suggests, the team is fixed on paper as a material worth playing with.

Paper, as the Zhiyinni team sees it, has a distinctive touch, translucency, color and texture, and can be reshaped at will. "We believe that beyond printing, design gives paper endless possibilities, and its uses will only widen." Sticky notes, tape, fold-corner wall calendars and paper-and-wood desk calendars were all being shown for the first time.

The lighting booth of Xcellent Design, from Taiwan, also caught plenty of eyes. Only up close could you see what made it different: none of the fixtures had bulbs. The light came entirely from glass.

This glowing glass is called a micro-curved mirror flat-panel light, and its light source is hidden completely. Unlike a conventional bulb it has no hot spot; an innovative light-guiding technology softens the light, a switch dims and brightens it, it gives off no heat while lit, and it can run for up to 500,000 hours.

Beyond these experiments with familiar materials, we noticed one move showing up at brand after brand: joining different materials together.

Zhiyin, again, is an example — waterproof fabric with metal, and wood with metal.

Ruyi, the home brand founded by designer Yuan Yuan, also mixed materials across many of its 2017 pieces, launched under the theme "Art Changes Life": coffee tables and side tables that pair marble with wood, armchairs that combine leather, walnut and acrylic. Different materials, hard or soft, cold or warm — in Yuan Yuan's words, "all to give the user a more varied sense of touch."

Furniture brands built on an "East meets West" look — HC28, Limitless, Mexarts — were playing with the same idea.

The independent home brand DOOK is another, working only in untreated wood paired with vegetable-tanned leather.

Its founder, Shen Min, thinks "New Chinese Style is everywhere now. A few years ago it was all-wood furniture; now it's wood with a bit of something else mixed in." He said he wanted to try combining metal and leather but could not find a supplier up to it — "nobody does it well; the technology probably isn't ready yet."

Photographs in this article: WUU, Zhiyin, Ruyi, Suyuan, Limitless, and on-site photography. Cover image from WUU and the reporter.