Keep us in the loop, and not just at market

Now that the dust has settled from market, I hope you've had a chance to evaluate how close you came to meeting your objectives. Don't be too hard on yourself if you didn't get to everything on your hit list. The odds are stacked against you if you play that kind of numbers game.

Face it: No exhibitor ever sees every buyer he or she hopes to see. And retailers, no matter how hard they work, are only going to see a minuscule percentage of the 3,000 exhibitors in High Point.

How well any of us did at market should be based not only on numbers. Instead, we should assess our performance based on how well we served the needs of our customer.

For suppliers, that means coming to market with product that offers a compelling price/performance story, regardless of selling price. Retailers should come to market with an eye for items that satisfy the needs of their respective consumers.

What about the trade press? Well, we need to judge ourselves the same way: how well we serve our customer, the reader. Our job is to bring our readers the news and analysis they need to help them make sound business decisions.

Just for the heck of it, I grabbed our opening day issue, our four daily issues and our post-market issue to see how we fared. With an aggregate 756 pages, including ad pages, we brought you more market news than all of our competitors combined.

But it's not only about quantity. It's about the quality of the stories published. The story we broke in Saturday's paper announcing Rowe's move to sell Mitchell Gold is just one example of timely, accurate, in-depth reporting.

I also love the fact that we can conduct a Q&A with marketgoers on a Friday and have their comments and photos in Saturday's paper.

Even so, the sheer size of the market means we can't visit every showroom or write a story about every exhibitor. It just ain't going to happen, and we probably have more reporters covering the show than anybody else.

Having said that, there are ways to improve your odds of getting coverage from Furniture/Today during the market cycle. You need to keep us in the loop all year long. We get scores of calls during market, often from first-time exhibitors we frankly are not aware of. Most of our staff tries to make appointments as a means of making market somewhat manageable, so we can't always respond to a call at 3 p.m. asking if we can send a writer right over.

Granted, late-breaking news is what we're all about, and we're really good at chasing it down. But remember that you are competing with 3,000 other exhibitors for potential coverage.

A head's up from you can only improve your odds.