Pantone Color of the Year 2024: Peach Fuzz

Yeah, no! We are not referring to the fine hair many women grow on their faces, known as Vellus hair. (And no, removing by shaving or other means will NOT make it grow back thicker or darker.) Rather, we are somewhat entranced by the latest Pantone Color of the Year, labeled Peach Fuzz (13-1023).

According to the influential color consultancy, “Peach Fuzz captures our desire to nurture ourselves and others. It's a velvety gentle peach tone whose all-embracing spirit enriches mind, body, and soul.”

“In seeking a hue that echoes our innate yearning for closeness and connection, we chose a color radiant with warmth and modern elegance. A shade that resonates with compassion, offers a tactile embrace, and effortlessly bridges the youthful with the timeless.” Leatrice Eiseman, Executive Director, Pantone Color Institute™

Everything’s Peachy with Pantone 2024

While these descriptions may seem a bit of a reach for a mere color, the company is not pulling its punches and refuses to settle for less. “In home design, Peach Fuzz creates a welcoming ambiance … and can promote feelings of warmth whether it is used on a painted wall or as an accent within a pattern.” (HomeAccentsToday.com)

“A cozy peach hue softly nestled between pink and orange … Peach Fuzz brings belonging, inspires recalibration and an opportunity for nurturing, conjuring up an air of calm, offering us a space to be, feel, and heal and to flourish from whether spending time with others or taking the time to enjoy a moment by ourselves,” expounded Ms. Eiseman.

“Drawing comfort from Pantone Peach Fuzz, we can find peace from within, impacting our wellbeing. An idea as much as a feeling, Peach Fuzz awakens our senses to the comforting presence of tactility and cocooned warmth.”

Whether you believe a gentle, cozy, and warm color like Peach Fuzz (13-1023) can achieve all of these things through the use of paint, wallpaper, furniture fabrics, rugs, and such, is a valid question. Yet, we do know this: each year the Pantone Color of the Year tends to shape “product development and consumer decisions in fashion, industrial and interior design, product packaging and other industry areas” every year. (npr.org)

There is little reason to doubt that next year will be no exception.

As always, Ted remains available for business consulting to the trade, whether you have questions about the various colors of the year for 2024 or basic business practices. Simply… Contact TD Fall today.

AI and Client Services – Chatbots and CVAs Are the Wave of the Future

AI and Client Services – Chatbots and CVAs Are the Wave of the Future

In our most recent post, we shared the belief that Artificial Intelligence (AI) would impact the design and furnishings industry sooner rather than later. Beyond AI-powered design apps, we will most likely see the increasing implementation of bots and virtual customer assistants (VCAs) to blend and improve AI and client services.

According to the research and executive support firm Gartner, emerging technologies such as “Bots and virtual customer assistants (VCAs) are becoming more widely adopted. They are of medium-high importance now but are expected to grow in importance in the future. These technologies act on behalf of the organization to deliver information or act on behalf of the customer to perform a transaction. Bots and VCAs can guide customers to the right resources at the right time to free up rep resources.”

“‘Sixty-eight percent of service leaders indicate that bots and VCAs will be more important in the next two years,’ says Lauren Villeneuve, senior principal, advisory at Gartner. ‘Service centers should seriously be considering how this technology could be integrated into current operations, in both customer-facing and rep-facing systems.’”

The Practical Use and Importance of Bots

“Leveraging AI bots and VCAs through web chat channels has proved successful for many service centers. Deploying bots can deliver various benefits, including:

• Greater capability and scale. AI bots are able to solve simple issues while letting advisors focus on the more complex tasks. Additionally, bots are able to help serve a growing customer base without the necessity of adding advisors.

• Faster chat speed. AI bots can drastically reduce customer wait time. One client reported chatbots replying with[in] five seconds of customer contact, while typical advisors take 51 seconds.

• Better gatekeeping. AI bots can learn to recognize other bots trying to gain access to systems, thus freeing advisors to only focus on actual customers.”

It is this nearly flawless flow from initial client contact to results-oriented solutions that improve client relations and free up a designer’s time, enabling them to focus on what they most love to do – reimagining a homeowner’s spaces. So, despite our nearly universal dislike of dealing with an AI when seeking service ourselves, the trend is for more, and better, chatbots and CVAs in our personal and professional lives.

As long as the better part of that sentence holds true, the inevitability of this trend should be something we look forward to seeing.

Ted remains available for business consulting to the trade on diverse issues which can include AI and customer service questions. To get in touch with him, simply… Contact TD Fall today.