With the fall Casual Market well underway, manufacturers and retailers alike are preparing for the 2026 season with optimism. However, the uncertainty of the economy leaves questions about how next season will look.
In a continued series of interviews with industry executives, Mark Bottemiller, vice president of sales for Homecrest, walks us through the state of the industry from his perspective. He offers his expectations about the Casual Market, the challenges of uncertainty and how the rest of the year will shape up.
What is the state of the industry right now?
Mark Bottemiller: The industry is tenuous. Everybody’s on tender hooks. Going into this season, many of us expected this to be the year that things went back to “normal” in terms of seasonality, store visits and the general flow of the marketplace. And for Homecrest, we did see that in the first quarter. But with all of the second-quarter turmoil and questions that were introduced because of the tariffs, what we saw is that business stopped. Retailers were moving toward getting through their inventory and getting back to a position of normalcy, and then July rolled around. We found that dealers were back in a position of being a little heavy on inventory because the door swings just weren’t there this spring. A lot of people decided to take a deep breath, wait for a minute to see how all of this was going to shake out. I think people are cautiously optimistic, but that, especially now with this October tariff on the horizon, retailers are taking a wait-and-see attitude.
As vice president of sales for a fully domestic company, do you feel more traffic has been driven to domestic manufacturers?
It’s about to be, based on what I’m seeing in our advanced early buy that we rolled out in July. I’m seeing significant movement towards domestic manufacturers. We saw a lot of new dealer activity in July and a lot of people who were there specifically looking for a domestic. The numbers in July were a little soft. We didn’t necessarily have the volume of dealers through the showroom, but the dealers who came through were very solid leads and a lot of new customers. There are not a lot of domestic players anymore. If you’re in the HDPE game, there are a few, but when you get to aluminum and metal cushioned goods, there aren’t very many of us. Domestic manufacturers have taken it on the chin over the last two decades, because it’s more expensive to buy American-made.
Will a focus on American-made products because of tariffs significantly change the industry?
If you asked me this in 2017, I would have said it’s going to be a catatonic shift in the industry. The industry absorbed the first 25% tariffs without even batting an eye. There’s a lot of angst, fear and uncertainty right now. And if the 50% tariff sticks, that’s going to have a whole different level of impact. The hard part is that nobody can plan for anything at this point because things change constantly. Regardless of your opinion on if they should be implemented, we need to have a decision one way or the other so the market can settle and we can figure out what we’re going to do. The biggest issue right now is people walking in the doors which is possibly in part of the tariffs, but it’s more about the general economic uncertainty.
Does this affect pricing for manufacturers and retailers?
Especially at the high end, we want to know where we are going and how we need to get there. The people who are at the lower end of the spectrum are having a good year and seeing this a little bit less. How does a dealer plan for their floor when the line that they bought a year ago has had a 13% surcharge increase? With midseason price increases and surcharges, higher-end brands are being more tenuous and so are consumers.
What’s your prediction for the remainder of the year?
We are all ready to get back to normal, or whatever normal is anymore. We’ve been saying that for nearly six years and, unfortunately, this might be it. We just have to wait and see. Remember the old Chinese blessing and curse — may you live in interesting times.
