The next show must go on...

Top Drawer in London was really fun, but it feels barely over before we're plunging into the next, which is the British Blind & Shutter Showcase 2012 at the Ricoh Stadium Coventry, England.

Roller blinds & blind accessories have been important to New House since the 80's. To anyone outside the industry, blinds probably looks like one of those odd little niche industries that no one ever thinks about. Yet in the UK alone, there are said to be 30 million blinds and someone has to design, think about style, colour, innovation, and marketing, and New House contributes a lot to this.

It's true that the industry is internationally dominated by one huge company, Hunter Douglas. They do a great job and own many of the big consumer brands, so it means that in the scheme of things, New House is only a tiny family-run business that my granddad started back in 1921.

Yet we've always been quite influencial in our way, as by employing three brilliant designers, Melanie, Charlotte and Laura (all RCA or CsM trained), our creativity has made a name for ourselves, and despite having our items manufactured in England or Sweden (so we've a price disadvantage), we.export a lot to discerning markets overseas.

In Coventry next week, we'll be launching our latest roller & accessory collection, and it's something we've been working on for 2 years.

Here's the front cover - the print is by Charlotte Farmer (and the photo was styled by her and Melanie too) :

This is the accessory part (pom-pom braid by Laura Fletcher) :

 

I'd love to reveal more.... but that would spoil the surprise!

 

In true family-business style Mum and Dad have been helping with the launch and their garage is full of display boxes they've been repainting for the show!

 

Our favourite show

It's last weeks news I know, but last weekend we very much enjoyed being at Top Drawer Olympia London again.

It's a lovely show, and we first exhibited there about 15 years ago. It was more an interior designer show then, and our designer Nicky Townley, created a gem of a stand in a tiny 2m x 2m space, and we've never looked back.

Top Drawer has changed since then but so has New House as our homewares department is now the fastest growing part of our family business. Because of our long-standing Swedish connections, we offer an interesting mix of vintage Swedish design and modern British.

At Top Drawer we launched new Christmas Swedish tea towels (such as moose) as well as new items from New House's British designers, Charlotte Farmer and Laura Fletcher.

This was our stand :

                                             

 

New textile machinery from New House

It's proably little-known, but New House has had a small textile machinery department since the 1950's, has been manufacturing specialist yarn-breakage equipment for export ever since.

In many textile processes there are often 1000's of ends of yarn going into a machine, and if one should break or a bobbin run out, there would be a line down the fabric, due to the missing yarn.

For years, New House have made detectors that spot these missing or broken yarns, and this year we've up-dated our system by minituruising it to handle finer yarns. Yesterday the first of our new system was sent to Germany. It's due to be fitted onto a huge weaving machine and re-exported to Finland.

 

We've already won a new textile machinery order for october, so hopefully there will be many more to come...

       

Lots going on behind the scenes...

For the last two years everyone at New House has been working on our new roller & blind accessory collection.

It's an important project for us, as discerning buyers from all round the world buy fabrics and blind accessories from NHT, and we're often amazed at how far-flung our roller blind sales can be.

I only have a few photos to show what our new collection might be, as it'll be revealed at Showcase 2012 in Coventry, England. The following few pictures might give you a tiny flavour of what we're up to :

'Stitch stripe' looks like someones run a sewing machine over a fabric, but in fact the weave is a cotton/polyester mix that when dyed, cleverly uses the fact that when cotton and polyester take up a dye, they do so differently. The finished effect looks amazing, and everyone at New House is queuing up to have this fabric in our windows.

 

Bright pink with pompoms... there will be a lot of pompoms in very BRIGHT colours

See-through fabrics are all the vogue, and there will be loads of them too....

For the first time we are redesigning our famous blind accessory collections at the same time as our roller fabrics. This means everything in our collection will coordinate fully, and our ROC or St. Martins designers have a field-day getting everything perfect.

More later......