"After-thought: Tough times, conservative designs. A flight to safety. That seemed to be one theme emerging from market: Retailers, more than ever, were looking for old reliables, even more than new fashionable winners. True?" Sadly, true. There is so much opportunity for innovation in our world today yes, even in the home textiles industry. The industries that embrace innovation are without question the ones seeing the most growth and profitability. There are more studies being done today on the impact of innovation than ever before. All the studies overwhelmingly have concluded that those companies who embrace innovation consistently experience exceptional growth and predictably outperform those competitors who do not embrace innovation. The home textiles industry, with very few exceptions, does not appear to embrace innovation and are not even open to it. They are united in their unwillingness to go outside their comfort zone. The only time the industry changes the way they do business in any way is when it has been forced upon them. Innovation and branding. Look at the additional revenue generated by manufacturers who have secured, let’s assume successful, license agreements with designers. This revenue, while significant in some cases, can be seen as extremely limited if you were to compare those revenues to the revenues that would be generated by a truly innovative "product." This would especially hold true if the "product" could take full advantage of every single “standard” top of the bed component and ensemble sold regardless of the specific price point or market segment. What if the product was designed to be purchased more often than other top of the bed components? What if you could enjoy greater margins on this new product than you could with any of your other top of the bed components? What if it were a window treatment that made much more sense than the window treatments being sold today. What if the window treatment were designed so that they were less expensive to make and you only had to make one size and because of the design, that worked for 99% of the windows in a typical home and to top it all off, it looked far superior to similar products being sold today? Alas, the introductions of products like these are not likely to happen given the current thinking. Most of the manufacturers and retailers in this industry are by and large complacent and are operating from a fear based mentality. Perhaps at any other time in the history of the industry this would be an acceptable response to the current environment. Today, this way of operating probably isn’t going to cut it. There is too much opportunity today, even for the home textiles industry. There are innovative products and concepts out there just waiting to be developed and implemented. Yes, there is a great deal of IP pertaining to the home textiles industry available out there. No one is really looking and those that have been exposed to innovative products and concepts dismiss them because they fail to recognize the value or potential and they quite frankly don't want anything other than what "they have now." They can more easily identify with what they have now and cannot comprehend anything other than that. Therein lies one of the inherent problems within the home textiles industry. The industry as a whole, has operated the same way for years and cannot conceive of doing anything differently. Why? It appears that they are psychologically unable to do so. It’s this thinking that has kept this industry essentially under the radar with consumers compared to other consumer products. There doesn’t seem to be many, if any, in this industry willing to consider, or for that matter, are equipped with the ability to recognize the enormous positive impact that innovation can have on their bottom line. Just because products have been developed by individuals who may or may not be working in the industry, it doesn’t appear, especially in today’s environment, that the industry can afford to ignore or dismiss innovation, or those who are developing these products. Hopefully, at some point, a manufacturer, who isn’t psychologically predisposed to respond to innovations and innovators by dismissing them, will seize the opportunity and will take advantage of all this IP out there. As Gary Hamel said in his book ‘Leading the Revolution,’ “Radical innovation is innovation that has the power to change customer expectations, alter industry economics and redefine the basis for competitive advantage.” There are innovations out there that could literally change the vocabulary of bedding and window design, yet there is an extraordinarily strong resistance to appreciate all the implications. The operative word Brent uses in his article is "safety." Many of our most successful products and accomplishments would never have seen the light of day if everyone operated on this basis. Yes, I know its cliché, but perhaps we should revisit Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity which is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” This holds painfully true for the home textiles industry especially with regard to product development. There are no guarantees that everything a manufacturer or retailer tries will be successful but there is also no way of telling how many times success has been unknowingly averted because someone was unable to recognize an opportunity simply because it was foreign to their way of thinking or doing business.