Is the Contract Interiors Industry Invisible to the Next Generation of Designers?

The average age of a specifier in the design community is 27 years old.

Let that sink in for a second.

The people who hold enormous specification power, the ones deciding what goes into projects before you ever get a call, are in their mid-to-late twenties. And most of them aren't finding us on LinkedIn. They're not opening our product-heavy emails. They're definitely not watching our YouTube channels, because we barely exist on YouTube.

So here's the real question: if they can't find us where they live, are we even in the game?

We Only Get One Meeting a Year

In a recent conversation with Clint Winn, President of Loftwall, we got into exactly this challenge. The A&D community is one of the most important influences in our industry.  They're at the front end of projects, shaping what gets specified long before furniture even enters the conversation. But access to them has never been harder.

Here's the reality. When you do get in front of them, you might get one meeting a year. Fifteen to twenty minutes to say who you are, what you do, and why you matter. That's it. And yet the vast majority of what we send them, emails loaded with product photos, spec sheets, "look how great we are" messaging, doesn't move the needle.

As Clint put it: if you're not engaged on the front end of projects, "someone else is writing the project or the RFP for you, and you're just reacting to it."

That's the uncomfortable truth.

Product-First Is the Wrong Strategy

The contract interiors industry is addicted to leading with product. And I get it, we make a living selling products. But leading with product in every channel, for every audience, is costing us access to the very people we need to reach.

The 27-year-old specifier is on Instagram. She's on TikTok. She is not waiting for your next email blast with six product images and twelve links. She wants to know who you are, what you stand for, why this product exists, not just what it does.

That's a different kind of content. It's a 30-second video where the president of your company tells the story of the problem that drove a product into existence. It's a newsletter that has a personality. It's content that makes someone stop scrolling because it feels real, not like a catalog came to life.

Clint and I talked about Heartwood, a rep group in Northern California. Jason and Kelsey Lauro are doing exactly this. Their social content is engaging, memorable, and fun. People watch it because it doesn't feel like advertising. That's the bar.

Meet Them Where They Are

We are a ghost town on YouTube. We are almost non-existent on Substack. These are platforms that the next generation of designers actually uses, and the contract interiors industry has largely ignored them.

The window of opportunity is still wide open. Most of your competitors aren't there either.

The brands and dealers who figure this out first, who show up on the right platforms, with content that puts people before product, in formats designed for short attention spans, those are the ones who will own the relationship with the next generation of specifiers.

The question isn't whether you can afford to change your content strategy.

It's whether you can afford not to.

The Trend Report Episode 194 with Clint Winn is out now — listen wherever you get your podcasts.