Atrium Foliage is celebrating our move into a permanent showroom in the C&D Building in High Point this spring, capping a year of growth that included expanding our sales rep base and launching a licensed line with the Smithsonian Institution.

We also left behind a crummy hole-in-the-wall warehouse that flooded during every rain storm, with our computers up on pallets, out of the wet, and moved into a real industrial park and into a real manufacturing facility, with what my husband describes as his fleet of fork lifts (two, count ‘em, two.) And of course, we did what every growing company has to do…we invested in more fancy-schmantzy software and hardware, which takes longer to install than expected and is more complicated than we were led to believe. Like many of you, we’ve been schlepping along that bumpy road to growth with our hearts in our throats and our hands on our wallets. Herewith, I share some of the tenets of marketing that have guided our growth.

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In his Design Trends 2008 report, C. Davis Remignanti, lead design consultant at Furniture.com (www.furniture.com), counsels consumers, “Good design is an organic and changeable thing—partly achieved by considering current trends and partly achieved by ignoring them. There are no hard and fast rules for achieving good design. Embrace or reject these trends as suits your taste. And, remember that however well put together a room may be, it’s meant to be used. If a room isn’t comfortable and inviting for those inside it, it’s a design failure, no matter how stylish it may be.”

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At the just concluded Winter Showtime fabric market held here in High Point, North Carolina, the Design Options, a Los Angeles-based trend and color forecasting company presented “What’s to Come and How to be Prepared.” Dedicated to bringing Southern California’s unique aesthetic to the world, Design Options, www.design-options.com, highlighted six trends for the Spring/Summer 2009 season.

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