Did Covid Really Change the Design Industry? A Business of Home Article Featuring Elite Design Assistants
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Let’s spare ourselves the lengthy trip down memory lane—the stomach-churning headlines, the cloth masks, the bleach-sprayed groceries. It started five years ago, to the month. We were all there, and we all remember what those early days of Covid were like.
Those of us in the industry also have a set of—let’s face it—complicated associations with the pandemic. While the world was falling apart, the world was buying furniture. Covid was a boom time, unleashing a fountain of opportunity for designers, retailers, manufacturers, and anyone else who could even tangentially claim to be in the business of home.
That boom is over. Some analysts predicted we’d forever be wearing masks and bumping elbows—that’s over, too. Save for scuffed-up social distancing stickers clinging stubbornly to linoleum floors, there’s not a ton of physical evidence that we recently went through a global pandemic.
But we’re all still operating in a world that has been shaped by Covid. And five years later, it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on all the ways the pandemic did (and didn’t) leave a lasting impact on the design industry.
VIRTUAL REALITY
With in-person gatherings canceled and in-person shopping cut back, the industry was flooded with a wave of virtual everything—online replacements for activities once conducted IRL. That started with rudimentary product presentations done ad hoc over Zoom, but soon evolved into a more baroque form. The first virtual showhouse arrived in 2020—with many more to follow—alongside virtual showrooms, virtual events, and even virtual conferences.
Many of these innovations have quietly faded away. The most recent virtual showhouses were held in 2023. Making a digital clone of one’s showroom hasn’t gone away exactly, but the solution didn’t become de rigueur for brands the same way having an Instagram account did. Virtual events haven’t disappeared either, but they’re often one-off seminars or extensions of real-world meetups. Gone are the multiday all-online conferences of 2021.
But the Covid era’s forced pivot to virtual did make a lasting impact. For one, it sparked startups like The Expert and Intro, which allowed designers to easily connect with clients for online consultations. Both have outlasted the pandemic, but even designers who aren’t on these platforms are embracing the model: quick, simple FaceTime or Zoom consultations for clients on a budget. It’s the version of e-design that seems to have staying power.
“Covid was definitely a catalyst, but the need it addressed was always there,” says Leo Seigal, co-founder of The Expert. “The pandemic just accelerated a shift that was already underway: Designers and clients were looking for more efficient, flexible ways to connect. … It’s less about Covid now, and more about how the industry has evolved to meet modern client expectations.”
Design businesses have changed as well. All-remote work never permanently took over the big firms—most returned to the office long ago. But a hybrid approach has allowed many to offer employees (and bosses) a greater degree of flexibility. And for smaller operators, there are new options. During Covid, a flood of companies offering remote back-end services for designers—rendering, purchasing, accounting, you name it—rose to prominence.
“We saw tremendous growth during Covid,” says Danae Branson, the founder of Elite Design Assistants, a company that provides a variety of remote services to the trade. For early-career designers—or those who just want to run a tight ship—it’s become easy to farm out pieces of the business to fractional employees who may live hundreds of miles away. “Our clients started requesting more services from us [and] we were able to start offering them almost everything that could be done virtually.”
Continue reading the full article on Business of Home’s blog to see all the ways Covid has (and hasn’t) impacted our design industry.
This article is reposted with permission from Business of Home: https://businessofhome.com/articles/did-covid-really-change-the-design-industry