Croscill Responds to Product Demand

By Staff -- Home Textiles Today, 8/20/2007 12:00:00 AM

New York —

The bath division of Croscill Home Fashions is seeing its shower curtain business beginning to grow more rapidly than its bath coordinates, so the company recently expanded its assortment.

Patrick Clemente, assistant product manager, design, bath accessories, told HTT many of Croscill's retail customers buy multiple shower curtains to coordinate with a single accessory grouping to give their shoppers more options: "Where there is less space to merchandise, a retailer might show one accessory set but easily show two or three curtains to go with it, and it's more bang for the buck."

Croscill's broad breadth of accessory offerings includes a slight shift away from resin, as the cost of this oil-based material continues to climb. Clemente explained that where resin used to occupy 60% of the line, it is now 50%. The other half is mostly ceramic, 45%, while 5% is made up of metal, glass and wood.

Croscill added for the first time melamine — a substance related to resin — as a new material for accessories.

Croscill partnered with textiles artist Carol Shiber to create two coordinate collections and a stand-alone shower curtain. The groupings are Palm Tree Trio and Gerber Daisies. The free-standing shower curtain is Island Dreamin'.