Madison Avenue had it right all along. Sex sells. Well - sex that creates babies anyway. One of the brightest spot in today's floundering economy is apparently centered on the children's furniture industry.
That's the news out of the furniture trade show in North Carolina this week, where salesmen are celebrating an expected 23 percent growth in the industry through 2012. Why now, in the midst of a recession? Americans aren't just having more kids - they're giving their kids their own bedrooms. And individual bedrooms means not just additional beds but dressers, desks and other furnishings.
Parents aren't scrimping. They're buying $700 beds and $500 desks. "It's not the cheap stuff like the race-car beds. It's substantial stuff," Tom Liddell, a vice president of sales for California furniture company Powell told the Canadian Press. Not surprising? We're not outfitting the rest of the house quite as lavishly as we are our kids' rooms. At Powell, the kids division saw a 45 percent increase in the past year. The rest of the company's sales are "not that shining," Liddell says.
With a focus on ensuring our kids' bedrooms are safe, it's getting harder to scrimp on their furniture. Where our parents' generation passed cribs from family member to family member, we're worried about toxins in the paint and recalls on the hinges. We're putting more emphasis on greening the home, and we're uneasy about little hands getting caught in handmade toy chests. My daughter actually has my old dresser, with the drawer broken by my brother when we were kids, but the rest of her bedroom furniture was purchased fresh during my pregnancy. Buying a convertible crib was our nod to saving money, but we were wary of cutting any more corners.
Apparently, we weren't the only ones.
Image: Amazon
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