New York Trend Shop: Day One Brooklyn

View From Brooklyn Bridge Park

I'm here in New York for a two day trend shop with colleague Erika Henderson who is the Director of Design for Woodard Furniture, a subsidiary of Craftmade International Inc. She and I are combing the city to see what we can find and bring back as inspiration for future product designs. We started in Brooklyn's Dumbo neighborhood which is an acronym for "Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass". In Dumbo we found some well know retailers like West Elm, Boconcept, etc. There was definite evidence of the upsizing trend from europe being utilized but in a very cautious way. In Paris the trend we identified was focused around oversized table legs and oversized lamps. West Elm for instance was doing this but much more subdued. Bigger than you would expect as a U.S. consumer but NOT as big as the Europeans.

Cobble Hill

So we headed south towards Atlantic Ave. in search of more boutique and original stores. In order to get there we went through the neighborhoods of Brooklyn Heights and into an area called Cobble Hill. This area really took me by surprise with it's beauty. It seems like time stood still for a few square blocks and you could visualize what it must have been like a hundred years ago. The huge wooden doors and carriage garages that lined the streets had me visualizing my new studio space. :) Ah, if only! :)

Reclaimed Lumber Bench and Table

At Atlantic there were two stores I want to mention. The first is Sterling Place with it's rather eclectic assortment of goods. They seem to embrace the industrial trend with a few really beautiful finishes in heirloom brass and polished chrome. In that spirit they have a lot of reproduction instruments like compasses, magnifying glasses and the like. We saw this in Germany earlier this year at boutique stores there as well. I bought my son a compass. Too cool. :) Warning: The website isn't nearly as cool as the store. I didn't see a lot of the items I'm mentioning here.

Greenhouse Ceramics

The second was a store called Greenhouse. Now this place has a cool website to go with the store. The products within had the nature inspired feel with subdued tones in the finishes and sun bleached/gray wood. I particularly loved the selection of ceramic dinnerware. The color choices were spot on and the combination of textures inside and out was original. FYI, I had to borrow the image on the right from the site. My images of the store blurred for some reason. Shameful and disappointing since they had some awesome bowls inside that I didn't see on the site.

Because of our late afternoon start a lot of stores started closing on us so it was time to return to our home base at the Aloft for dinner and strategy. Tomorrow we head into Manhattan where I expect quite a bit more excitement than today had to offer. I'll keep you posted.

Local Brew. Cheers!

Oh, one more thing. It's funny when you are not used to it but we walked through three photo shoots today. The first was a fashion shoot, the second was for Gossip Girl and the third . . . well we couldn't figure it out. There was a bunch of large buses and not much else to go by. It's like every corner we turned there was something. Pretty amazing to see what happens in the fast lane. Cheers!