Multiline Showroom Get Creative, Finding Their Groove Despite Being Shuttered

The R Hughes showroom at ADAC in AtlantaCourtesy of R Hughes

Original article posted at Business of Home on April 22, 2020

That’s not to say that having the doors closed isn’t painful. Ryan Hughes and Steven Leonard, partners in the independent Atlanta multiline showroom R Hughes, were set to install an entirely new look for spring in the first week of April. Instead, they shut their doors voluntarily on March 12, the first shop in ADAC to do so.

“We wanted to be proactive,” says Hughes. “My thought was, after watching the news: The sooner we shut down, the sooner we get through this, and hopefully people will follow our lead.”

“We were in a healthy position to make the decision,” adds Leonard. “I know that decision to lose income was scarier for others, especially since Donghia was literally packing up their showroom as this was unfolding.”

Hughes and Leonard spent the first week touching base with designers, seeing who had active projects and who was going on pause. They were pleasantly surprised to find that orders were still rolling. But going on the offensive for new business required a different approach—to go to clients instead of the other way around.

“Our showroom is our biggest selling tool,” says Hughes. “Not having that is a challenge, but we’re taking the approach of really specific outreach to the designers who have projects still active, putting together Dropboxes of selections that are tailored to what they’re working on.”

For Hughes, it feels a bit like a return to the early days, when the showroom was in a more remote Atlanta location instead of the design center and he had to hustle to grab designers’ attention. “I remember back in 2011, Barry Dixon called, and I put together a printout packet and FedExed it to him—it’s just like that now, only digital.” (Dixon, for the record, still prefers FedExed printouts.)

For Lavin, the shutdown has been an opportunity to loosen up on some old restrictions (“I now know that salespeople can work from home—I never knew that!”) and learn some new skills. The Thomas Lavin marketing director convinced Lavin, long a social-media holdout, that he had to start generating some content, pronto. In recent weeks, Lavin has been posting quickfire introductions of spring launches, and hosting the occasional Instagram Live cocktail party.

“It started out rough—every video took 15 takes,” says Lavin. “Now I can pretty much do it on the first take. … We’ve been focusing more on having people on our social media—we realized that product doesn’t drive engagement, people do.”