There`s the long, agonizing way to buy a sofa, which calls for visits to half a dozen stores, perching gingerly on couches and thinking suspicious thoughts about the stuffing.
Bette Rosenberg likes the short route, the really short route, where the sofa turns up in a catalog, you fall in love, then pick up the phone and dial. Total elapsed time: 1 second to tear out the page, a day or two of pondering; 2 minutes on the phone.
Rosenberg is the director of home furnishings for Oak Brook-based Spiegel, whose inch-thick mail-order catalog sells everything from $13 doorstops to $1,100 sofas. The company, with its semi-annual and specialty catalogs, reaches more than 30 million households. Occasionally, a shopper, seduced by one gloriously coordinated photograph, will write a check for one entire room.
The Spiegel catalog offers less furniture than Colby`s or Marshall Field`s, and the styles never startle. ”Pretty” is the operative word here, and ”comfortable,” and sometimes ”contemporary,” and under Rosenberg, that`s as daring as it gets.
But Spiegel`s typical customer wouldn`t gamble on something radical from Milan, and she`s too busy to test-drive her own furniture. She lives near a big city, where she easily could shop around, but as a working woman she lacks the time.
She`s also likely to be 40 years old, married and a homeowner. She works, and her household income is about $46,000.
It`s a profile that happens to fit Rosenberg fairly well, with a few key differences. For example, most people find it stressful enough to shop for just one home. Bette Rosenberg, 49, is in charge of shopping for thousands-31 percent of Spiegel`s sales come from home furnishings-and she loves it.
Her job is to cut to the heart of reams of market research (”The sense of home and family is very strong; it will continue at least through 1995,”
she says, asked to wrap it all up), stir in some color predictions-tea rose, hazelnut, old lace, cilantro, bark-and give Spiegel`s team of buyers a single vision as they trek around the world.
”Things from four or five buyers will go into a single photograph,” she explains, ”so all the buyers must work toward a single look.”
Seated at a small conference table, Rosenberg talks to her staff of five with such concentration that a visitor is able to study her unnoticed.
She gets to work before 8 a.m. and leaves at 6:30 ”if I`m lucky,”
plugging into one meeting and then another and then a third, taking notes, asking questions, checking her date book. ”What will the copy say?” she asks at a marketing meeting, scrutinizing the layout for an upcoming catalog. ”The idea is, these are the hottest, latest looks that can help you create a personal style.”
Rosenberg studied journalism at the University of Iowa but never applied to a newspaper. ”In my generation we went to college to find a husband-which I did,” she says. For most of their 28-year marriage, she and Jerry Rosenberg have lived in the same house in Northbrook.
A new direction
As their three children grew up, Rosenberg went back to school, studied interior design and began her own firm. She loved the independence but hated ordering furniture for her clients: It showed up cracked, or chipped, or somehow wrong, and Rosenberg would have to wrestle with the manufacturer to make things right.
”There were too many problems,” she says. After placing each order, ”I would wait like I was sitting on a time bomb for the next thing to go wrong.” Eight years ago, with some relief, she dropped the business and joined the Spiegel staff. Today she works with 21 buyers, traveling with them to Italy, Portugal, England, France and other countries, ordering samples of furnishings, fabrics, accessories, kitchen equipment and electronics.
But nothing is purchased by whim. The market research piled on Rosenberg`s desk has told her a great deal about what customers will want. She has learned, for example, that blues, greens and touches of gold will be among the hot colors for the early `90s, and that natural materials-linen, cotton, wood and stone-will be in demand.
With this knowledge she draws up a master shopping plan, complete with sketches, photographs and color chips, steering the buyers in several clear-cut directions.
She also has to pick out popular styles without giving in to fads. While Southwestern style was hot, for example, Spiegel devoted as many as 12 pages to the look. Today the catalog mixes in the most classic Southwestern elements, such as painted furniture, with a lot of other styles.
”Changes in style have to be gradual,” Rosenberg says. ”The customer doesn`t want to be jerked around.”
Rosenberg makes as many as 16 shopping jaunts a year, many of them in the United States. Ultimately, more than 50 percent of the pieces in the catalog are made in this country.
And for every object that makes it into the catalog, Rosenberg says, 12 others have been ordered, inspected and finally rejected.
Setting up a room
A few of Spiegel`s room settings are photographed in real homes around the country, but most are shot in 10 studios in the Chicago and New York areas. In the studio, Spiegel starts from scratch: Wood floors are laid down, ceilings dropped in, locks installed on the windows, and bed linens alternately ironed and rumpled to give that plush, crisp, inviting look.
The fall/winter catalog, to be mailed on June 25, opens with a section called ”Simple Pleasures.” Customers will see pared-down environments and suggestions of deep comfort: an overstuffed reading chair, a Victorian claw-footed tub, a ”Bean Cuisine” package for long-simmering soup.
”It`s about getting back to basics,” Rosenberg says. ”The frills of the `80s don`t seem nearly as important to us now. We understand how much pressure you`re under-you need a simple, relaxed home.”
Readers also will see a section called ”Living Better at the Same Address,” geared to renovators and other homeowners who would rather improve than move. ”We`ll offer suggestions on how to fix up the walls without hiring a contractor, such as decorative screens, architectural detailing, faux painting kits, shelving and lighting,” Rosenberg says.
Both sections will be shot in New York.
Important concepts
”We try to create concepts for everything we do,” Rosenberg says. ”We discuss what`s important to the customer now: family, home, heritage, tradition, roots. So we don`t bother with a Southwestern Christmas or a Harlequin Christmas.
”We`ll do `Grandma`s Attic,` which relates to the grandmother who made us feel loved, or `Mountain Christmas,` which says, `Come on over, we`ll sit by the fire, it`s down home, it`s comfortable, no pretentions.` ”
Presently immersed in the coming catalogs for Christmas 1990 and spring 1991, Rosenberg offers her own decorating predictions.
”We`ll have a feel for a more glamorous approach to decorating,” she says. ”I call it New Age Style: a sense of luxury but very comfortable. For example, I won`t say, `Take off your shoes on my white carpet,` because my home is no longer a showcase but an expression of me.” Watch for gold and silver leaf appearing on furniture, fabrics and wall coverings.
At the other extreme, some people will want comfort without the luxury, preferring European country decorating and signs of nature indoors. They will warm up their homes with wood and stone, primitive and ethnic accents and collections of folk art.
In many homes, the bedroom will become ”the new living room, where people can lock out all their problems,” Rosenberg predicts. To promote this luxurious bedroom look, Spiegel is offering custom-made curtains that appear lavishly draped but can be hung with a single rod.
Finally, like many other designers, she foresees a national craving for more white space. Rosenberg calls this ”the new Puritanism.”
”Our customer wants to simplify her life,” she says. ”She can do it with glamor or with a relaxed look.
”Quality is the No. 1 consideration, then simple lines. She`ll have well-chosen accessories, instead of filling rooms with clutter and layering pattern on pattern.”
