Some of us may look back with rose-tinted spectacles to a time when hair was long, revolution was on the streets and bean bags were the furniture of choice in most British households. Unfortunately, it is all a myth, including the idea that everyone sat around on beanbags. To my surprise, the sales of bean bags in the UK are actually much stronger today.
Wander round the high streets of Britain, however, and you would be forgiven for thinking that little has changed in the world of bean bags for forty years. Most of the bean bags on offer in mid market stores seem to value low price over any measure of quality. Overall, there is little sign of the excitement in design or quality of construction that has come to typify other areas of soft furnishings, so it is surprising that bean bags are enjoying such as renaiassance.
The answer as to why the UK is seeing ever-increasing sales of bean bags at a time when there appears to be little product development is to found on the internet. Frankly, all the exciting stuff is here, not on the high street. The most visible player in the online market is BeanBagBazaar who, although a relative newcomer, have transformed the quality of bean bags on offer and, in the process, turned themselves into the biggest bean bag supplier in the UK.
What really marks this business out, and what has undoubtedly led to its preeminent position in the market, is that they set out to reinvent bean bags with high quality construction, high grade furnishing fabrics and novel shapes and sizes that were built around how people wanted to use bean bags. The result is that the company website features more product choice that any other site we could find, including beanbags for kids, outdoor use and even character products for babies. We also discovered that they employ full-time designers in the UK and have a marketing team that is constantly developing new ideas through customer research. That is something that we suspect is new to bean bags, if the normal retail products are anything to go by.
It is great to see a product category where the design skill of British designers is rebuilding a market. Bean bags offer offer an insight into the much bigger problem of dominant high street retailers stifling innovation by simply buying the cheapest products from China and not thinking about consumer needs.
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