High Point by Design aims to make city a year-round design destination

 HIGH POINT – High Point is a city of contradictions. It’s known as the “furniture capital of the world,” but it’s also a city with downtown streets that stay mostly empty save a few weeks of market each year.

But High Point by Design (HPxD) aims to change that. The new initiative—which is a joint effort between local showrooms, designers and other High Point influencers—looks to keep the streets of downtown busy outside market weeks with showrooms open to designers and other shoppers year-round. For High Point natives like Mr. Brown London marketing manager Ginny Rasmussen, this is an important piece long missing from the downtown revitalization puzzle. 

“The big issue we’ve faced in High Point in terms of revitalization is we’re so tethered to the furniture industry, and we’re not open year-round,” said Rasmussen. “We rely so much on these two weeks of the year to showcase our products and bring people to town, that other small businesses haven’t been able to thrive as much. Growing up here, it was always like, ‘what is this downtown area?’ I never spent time down here unless it was market, and now it feels like this huge opportunity sitting there.”

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There has long been talk of year-round showroom openings in downtown High Point, and that chatter has intensified over the past few years as other revitalization projects such as a minor league baseball stadium and the mixed-use Cogden Yards development have come to fruition. Earlier this year, a group of industry leaders led by Cohab Space owner John Muldoon began meeting to formulate a plan to offer year-round access to showrooms for designers and boutique clients. 

For several months, the group hashed out the parameters necessary to make such an initiative possible—which brands could be involved, who they could sell to, whether consumers would be allowed to shop in addition to designers and retailers. 

“The big vision is reinventing High Point as a hub of creativity and design, and there’s a process for vetting and on-boarding new showrooms,” said Kathy Devereux, owner, Devereux Marketing and member of the HPxD planning group. “We actually have something called a flight manual that outlines the rules and regulations. Some are a little softer in terms of style and aesthetic, and others are very clear, like you cannot sell to consumers at a designer discount.”

The founding class of HPxD showrooms includes 214 Modern Vintage, BoBo Intriguing Objects, Branch Home, Cohab Space, Mill Collective, Mr. Brown London, Oly Studio, Randall Tysinger Antiques, Red Egg, Schwung Home, South + English, Splashworks, The Royals Project and Verellen. The businesses think of each other as friendly rivals, each bringing their own distinctive flavor to the mix.

“Everyone in High Point by Design, I would feel totally unthreatened with them coming into the showroom,” said Palmer Linwood Smith, co-owner of South + English. “They don’t want to do anything anyone else is doing.”

The showrooms opened their doors in September during Premarket, an event previously exclusively for brands catering to large-scale retailers. Additional brands, such as Abner Henry, signed on to HPxD just prior to Premarket.

“It’s a curated group of privately held brands, and we believe the design aesthetic within our organization is aligned with the design aesthetic of the other brands, but offers enough differentiation that we feel we’re making a strong contribution,” said Katherine Respess, territory sales manager, Abner Henry. “We think it’s going to be a wonderful collaboration to help each other grow our businesses and brand awareness.”

While some of the brands are headquartered in High Point and have local staff to accommodate year-round sales, others like Abner Henry, which is based in Ohio, don’t yet have boots on the ground to open daily. 

“We recognize it’s a big idea, and the thought of reconfiguring High Point as a hub of design and creativity year-round, how does this happen?” said Devereux. “We saw early it needed to be an iterative strategy of crawl, walk, run. Not everyone is ready to be open every day tomorrow, so our message to people like Abner Henry is, ‘are you willing to work toward that and give it a go?’ Understanding that we’ve got to earn our stripes, and we’re not asking anyone to make a bad business decision.”

The architects of HPxD envision downtown High Point eventually becoming an attraction like ADAC in Atlanta and 200 Lex, the New York Design Center. For local and regional designers, that concept is enticing particularly in the time of COVID, when travel and trade shows are more limited. 

“We have big projects coming up and we say, ‘let’s wait for market,’ but you need to be stimulated and keep your creative juices flowing,” said Asheville designer Laurie Springer. “If there was a list that was published of open showrooms, if we have a project we’d say, ‘cool let’s go.’”

And for High Point natives like Rasmussen, it just makes sense to share everything the city has to offer every day of the year.

“We’re the furniture capital of the world—why shouldn’t we be a design center open for everyone to come here five days a week?” she said. “We have everything—the furniture, the textiles, we have it all.”

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