HomeDecShow Offers Amplified Sales Effects

By James Mammarella -- Home Textiles Today, 3/9/2010 12:00:00 AM

At the New York Market —

“Picture this,” said Mitch Buchwalter, ceo of HomeDecShow. “You're at a physical business convention — but in a virtual world online — where you can attend as an exhibitor or as an attendee, 'walking' the show. But it's not really a 'show' — it's a community that stays up and running 365 days, 24/7.”

Welcome to HomeDecShow, the streamlined, internet-anchored business community Buchwalter is bootstrapping as a means for home décor vendors and buyers to get face to face and sample goods and services with far lower cost of entry than has traditionally been possible.

With a hard launch date looming by the third quarter of this year, HomeDecShow will be especially valuable to newer, smaller, entrepreneurial companies in the industry, Buchwalter explained. Each online “exhibitor booth” can feature unlimited amounts of updated videos, slideshows and other product information.

Through his company and the main service provider, Onstreammedia.com, subscribers can also avail themselves of HomeDecShow press release software, email campaign software, webinar and blogging tools, and automatic links to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networking internet tools and websites, he said.

HomeDecShow won't necessarily stop at introductions, he added. There is the potential for a wealth of order tracking, billing and other back office functions that subscribers can tap.

Buchwalter, based in Weston, Fla., is both a Wharton-trained accountant and a seasoned veteran of the home textiles industry, having worked with vendors Lorraine Linens and Quaker Lace.

At the current edition of the New York Home Fashions Market, the concept of HomeDecShow will be presented to and discussed among “designers, machine manufacturers, yarn producers, wholesalers, distributors and others,” he said.

One thing that HomeDecShow will not be, Buchwalter stressed, is “a static site with still pictures.” He explained, “You will know when someone's in your booth — you get an alert, and you can start chatting with them. You can assign a salesman each day — the alert will ring his or her mobile phone. You can do a webcast with video right from your showroom.”

With the website — www.homedecshow.com — now in the construction phase, much is still left to the imagination. But Buchwalter is not inclined to oversell the benefits.

“HomeDecShow is not going to replace belly-to-bell selling,” Buchwalter told HTT. “You won't be able to touch a fabric — but it will give you additional lead generation that you would normally not have — it will help your company reach out virally to people around the world.”

Having played an active role in the home textiles world “since before the fax machine,” Buchwalter said he thinks “the industry is still way behind other industries. I'd like to be the one that helps take the industry into the 21st century.”