If you’re an interior designer or just someone whose business depends on coming up with new ideas every now and then, being creative is a must. As you probably already know though, one of the biggest challenges to creativity is getting the mind to shut up long enough for you to focus.

Now here is a good way to clear your mind for some new and different thinking that may sound a bit counter-intuitive. Before you start thinking about your creative project…

That’s right. Don’t think. At least not immediately. You see, ideas begin to flow or start to bubble up to the surface more readily when you first use a form of relaxation or meditation that slows or cuts down on all of your brain chatter.

Got a new project or problem that could use a healthy dose of creativity? Here is all you need to do to get started before you get started:

1. Find a quiet place where there will be no interruptions including the phone or anything else that might disturb you.
2. Pick a word or short phrase that will help focus and center your mind. This ‘mantra’ can be anything you want. Some suggestions might include the words: Original. Creativity. New idea. Prosperity. Success. (The options are endless. There is no right or wrong word. Whatever comes to your mind first and feels good is fine. PLEASE, DON’T OVERTHINK THIS PART!!!)
3. Sit up straight with your palms facing up on your lap.
4. Close your eyes (optional).
5. Take a slow deep breath from your belly up through your nose all the way to your shoulders.
6. Release the breath slowly through your nose in the reverse direction.
7. As you breathe, focus on the word(s) you chose and keep repeating it silently to yourself.
8. Do this for one, three, or five minutes (longer if you want.)

There is a really good chance that when you perform this exercise, other ‘life’ thoughts will vie for your attention. That’s okay and very natural. When this happens, just say to the thought ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ and go back to concentrating on your ‘word’.

All this may seem a little weird or difficult at first, but it gets easier the more you do it. After you do this exercise and your mind is at least a little clearer or focused, you should be able to start creating with a little more ease than you would’ve before.

Oh, and one side benefit of this brain ‘silencing’ technique is that it can lower your blood pressure and stress. Now it’s your turn. Let us know how this exercise works for you and if there are any techniques that you use to help get those creative juices flowing.

Now here is some more good news for the kitchen & bath industry: The builder confidence in the market for newly built, single-family homes has reached its highest level since February 2007.

This recent increase is a 2-point gain on the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI) that follows a six-point increase in July.

According to the chairman of the National Association of Home Builders, Barry Rutenberg, builders believe that prospects for sales are better than they’ve been for over five years. And though there is always room for improvement, we’ve come a long way from where we were in recent years and the outlook continues to brighten.

Though builders continue to express their frustrations over the inventory of distressed properties as well as inaccurate appraisal values and the difficulty of accessing credit for both building and buying homes, this increase in builder confidence bodes well for local economies and the future of our k&b industry.

Now it’s your turn. Please share with us what improvement, if any, you’ve been seeing in your business as a result of this positive, growing trend.

For the full press release, check out this link: http://www.nahb.org/news_details.aspx?newsID=15478

In a recent post about Amazon.com potentially adding ‘same day’ delivery service to their portfolio of competitive advantages, we asked readers a ‘simple’ question:

What do you do to get your showroom visitors to buy from you

instead of e-tailers like Amazon.com (aka: showrooming)?

Besides demonstrating that this is a heated topic for our industry, the large number of responses we received was extremely enlightening and helpful. Here is just a small sampling:

JM: I like buying locally. The service is (should be) superior, The client should develop a trust in your expertise and your follow-thru ability. It is up to you to prove the value of doing business with you and the company that you work for. Number one is– if there is a problem of some kind, you can handle it in person. I always share a horror story of one of the most recent “bail-outs” that we have made when the product shows up wrong. As they say, the internet isn’t going away, you have to sell yourself and the benefits of your company are service after the sale…etc.

JS: Jobsite and subcontractor coordination is also a big service that showrooms and showroom professionals provide. We are able to order products from a variety of manufacturers, safely unload and receive them, and store them until the appointed time. We can then take the correct products to the jobsite complete, deliver them to the correct subcontractor, and document the entire process. We usually do this at the rough-in, again for the under-mount sinks and lavs, and a final time at trim-out. While anyone can buy just about anything on the internet, having it arrive at the right time and get in the right hands is crucial to the efficiency of a project. Trim material delivered to the jobsite at rough-in will almost certainly be damaged, missing parts, or will just “vanish”. This is worth more than just the price of the material; it’s worth a great deal to the flow of the project, the efficiency of the subcontractors, and the profitability of the builder/GC.

DC: I would love for more of my vendors to have and enforce map policies. We try to combat that by not itemizing prices on our quotes and not giving the customer an itemized list of items. A multi-head shower might not list all the rough in pieces or drop ell’s needed but simply be referred to as brand/model name shower with 3 body sprays and hand shower.

We usually make a point of mentioning our service after the sale and letting the customer know that if there is a problem with the product, we are the ones contacting the mfg and reps to resolve it. If they buy online or from box store they will have to do their own support.

Due to certain manufacturers making a lower quality product for boxes (we never call it lower priced), if a customer comes in with a problem, we will give customers the contact information for a Manufacturer and tell them that we are not able to order parts or have specifications for items not sold thru distribution channels. I guess it all boils down to educating our customer and selling the benefits of what we bring to the table.

Now it’s your turn. Please tell us the challenges you’ve faced with showrooming and  how you are closing sales with shoppers in your showroom.

First, the bad news: At its current rate of growth, it is predicted that by 2016, Amazon.com will be the second largest retailer in the country behind Wal-Mart. And with the opening of more distribution centers around the country, experts believe that it’s just a matter of time before they also start offering customers ‘same day delivery’.

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/amazon-offer-same-day-delivery-change-way-shop-151801298.html?l=1

Now the good news: As Amazon continues to pepper the country with more and more distribution centers, (so far: Arizona, California, Delaware, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington), they are feeling more and more pressure from state and federal authorities to start charging tax. Bye-bye sale tax advantage.

And when you add to that that Amazon (and other e-tailers) will never have a showroom like yours or be able to match the expert knowledge and personal service like yours, you have even more good news. The trick for turning this bad news into good news starts with you creating a greater presence for your company online beyond just your website. Think social commerce where social media is combined with ecommerce on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

With this enhanced presence on the web, you have a better chance of getting people to find you and then show up in your showroom to see the products they want in-person. The only challenge then is: how do you convince that hot prospect that the value you bring to the table is worth the few dollars they’ll save by not ‘showrooming’ and buying from Amazon?

Now we’d like your opinion or ideas on how you’re making this happen.

While numerous kitchen and bath dealers continue to use a website and costly print advertising as their sole methods of marketing, others have found that community involvement is a cost-effective way to raise awareness for their business while helping others. One company that has benefited from this public relations approach is Allied Kitchen & Bath located just outside of Fort Lauderdale.

Bill has also championed the cause for industry relations. He has served on various industry national boards including NKBA. Most noteworthy were his US congressional meetings in Washington, DC to discuss the local concerns of businesses in Florida and throughout the country.

“Allied hired a professional public relations firm to help coordinate the influx of media attention that has developed over the last few years,” Bill added. “But we definitely rely on our in-house staff to come up with more ideas that will maximize our commitment to the local community.”

Through the years, the approach to marketing for dealers nationwide has changed. Gone is the importance of yellow pages and newspaper advertising. Yet, the need for local marketing efforts continues to grow. Building marketing campaigns now includes working closely through the web with manufacturers that support local initiatives. Local dealers supporting local causes that meet local concerns is one of the best ways to garnering the attention of consumers.

Networking has always been a great way to increase your presence in the minds of your target market. The explosion of online opportunities for networking is a cost effective way to build your brand, which today is you, your products and your expertise.

There are also numerous ways to get your message out through social media. One easy way is to allow your own sales staff to build their own bridge to the consumer by marketing themselves through social media as experts in their local areas. This bringing together of social media and ecommerce know as social commerce can help you grow your own network of clients using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, just to name a few.

I would like to hear from others what you have done to increase awareness of your business through community involvement and social commerce.

Al Rykus, Rykus Holdings Inc.

In what feels like thousands of years ago, when consumers used to shop the internet, they would land on your website and randomly peruse the pages of what amounted to be an online catalogue. Said catalogue may have been broken up into brand, price, style or product categories– but it was still just a static (paperless) catalogue and shoppers were pretty much alone in their quest.

Boy, have times changed. Thanks to the explosion of social media, people are now sharing reviews and listening to personal referrals before they buy. And who can blame them for having these online conversations? As much as Consumer Reports is a trusted product rating resource, it can’t beat an enthusiastic ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ from a trusted friend or blogger that they follow.

So now enter a site like Pinterest—an image-sharing social service where people can instantly upload and store photos of products they know or are interested in. Grouped together into fun and easy-to-search categories for their own future reference or for the reference of others, the popularity of this site is making internet history. To begin to grasp this last statement, check out this video (please forgive the opening commercial).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UR2i7IXOsQ4

Though it’s not quite clear as yet how Pinterest will be prospering from its popularity, other companies are already cashing in on the potential. One example is a site called Copious that gives shoppers a place where they can buy any of the products that were shared with them on social media sites like Pinterest (as well as Facebook and Twitter). The goal is to replace boring, static ‘catalogue’ shopping with an evolving mix of trusted friend and blogger-recommended choices.

Jim Rose, the co-founder and CEO for Copious talked about this new form of ‘social commerce’– that elusive Holy Grail of effectively combining social networking with e-commerce: “Conversation is always ongoing. That’s why people go back to Facebook on a daily basis, but don’t necessarily go back to Amazon.com on a daily basis.”

In other words, by creating an ever-evolving shopping experience for your customers, you are giving them an exciting reason to return over and over again. When have you ever heard about an online catalogue doing that?

So now it’s your turn to share. What role do you think this newest transformation of social commerce will play, if any, in the future of your business? Are you going to sit it out and see what happens next or are you going to find a way to jump in and ride the shifting tide?

As you probably already know firsthand, when a consumer researches products in your showroom and then buys them online for lower prices, that’s the dreaded trend known as showrooming. What you may not know, is how to counteract this business-draining phenomenon. Here’s one possible solution:

At a recent shareholders’ meeting for Best Buy Inc., CEO Mike Milkan told investors that “We can no longer just focus on the box…We must focus on both the physical and virtual customer experience…delivering the best price, and strengthening our technical expertise are key to our strategy for reversing the practice of showrooming.”

He went on to say that store employees would be getting new training and mobile technology like tablet computers so they can better serve their customers. By expanding their technology services to consumers while offering them the ‘best’ price (in-store or online), Milkan believes this will be the key to successfully competing with online retailers like Amazon, one of their biggest competitive threats.

Part of their enhanced ‘customer experience’ is providing shoppers with the two levels of research they are coming to embrace as the ‘norm’: hands-on, in-store product research and online product details plus customer reviews.

At that same shareholders’ meeting, Stephen Gilbert, president of Best Buy Digital, global marketing and strategy said, “There is something that can compete with and beat free-shipping, and that is in-stock, right now, and near me.” If [customers] come into your store and experience that with the right trained person and the right transparency to price and reviews and product, we feel very happy with our odds to engage that customer.”

Now it’s your turn. We would love to hear your thoughts about how you’ve been affected by ‘showrooming’ and how you think Best Buy’s solution could work for you and your business.