As business gets back to normal after two years of what some call a “sales anomaly,” expectations for 2023 have been fairly neutral.
Joseph Cilio, CEO and president of Alfresco Home, says he doesn’t have many concerns for 2023.
He explains that while the first seven months of 2022 were strong, a slight dip happened because of people’s inventory position and the media talking about the state of the economy.
“That plays with people’s minds,” he says
He thinks the opposite might happen this year, where the first four or five months show people readjusting their needs and their inventories, and then come summer and the casual show in Atlanta, retailers will buy aggressively.
“And if they didn’t need to prepare too much for 2023, then they will prep heavy for 2024,” he says. “I just think it’s a rebalancing period. And that’s what we’re seeing in the transition. But the outdoor living sector, in my opinion, is extremely strong and a very confident industry to work in. Always has been.”
The company wouldn’t share numbers, but Cilio says it grew solid double digits over the past couple of years and that there may be a leveling out now that the pandemic is behind us.
“We had very strong growth over the last three years, and we were growing before the pandemic,” he says. “But we plan on growing after the pandemic. The reality is, every company is a little different — how they behaved during the pandemic and what they were able to do. We were aggressive in product development and design. We were aggressive in hiring the right people to perform and execute the right roles, both internally and as a sales team.”
He also says that many decisions the company made in terms of planning strategy paid off during the pandemic.
“But those were strategies that were put in place to be effective and fruitful after that pandemic,” he explains. “So we’re seeing some of the materials we’re using in furniture, and new fabric designers, sales folks and new retailers that we brought on — all of these things have come together and we look forward to continuing to build on those relationships and ideas.”
As part of that growth strategy, the company doubled up on its introductions the last couple of years, because it felt that it was better to introduce a midseason, but it’s going back to single releases now.
“But we didn’t stop; we actually put a little more effort behind it,” he says. “We’re trying to put some more creativity and innovation behind our development. And our customers reacted well to what we were doing.”
However, Cilio thinks that the move from Chicago to Atlanta is going to be a reawakening for the casual industry because it puts outdoor companies in front of a whole slew of buyers who aren’t familiar with them.
“There are going to be a lot more people looking at us than there have been in previous years,” he says. “And I think it could bring the whole industry to a whole new level in terms of opportunities for growth and partnership.”
The possibility of a recession could slow things down, Cilio says, but the casual industry is a bit more resilient to the effects of a recession than many other industries.
“There are always retailers who tend to be conservative during this time, and maybe they’re not as aggressive,” he explains.
Even when people don’t buy whole new sets of furniture in the down years, he says, they’re still going to go out and buy replacement cushions and umbrellas and rugs and accessories. Which means there’s almost always something there for them to buy.
