Issue #00009 : January 15, 2026

Hello,

The industry descends on Paris this week. And with it, hundreds of new launches and the hopes and dreams of an industry endlessly hoping for a return to the post-Covid boom times.

Paris Design Week opens this week, starting with Paris Déco Off—the rebellious offshoot event that escaped from the monolithic drudgery of the Maison & Objet convention a decade ago. What started as a handful of fabric and wallpaper houses opening showrooms in Saint-Germain has become the most important week on the design calendar.

This is where new collections launch. Where the AD100 walks cobblestone streets with champagne flutes in hand. Where you’re more likely to close a deal over a Burgundy than in a booth at Villepinte.

The “Americans in Paris” party (harder to get into than the Met Gala) happens Thursday night. Every name that matters will be there (except me, I didn’t get an invite).

Maison & Objet still exists, of course. It is a mass market show, with flashes from some select luxury brands. West Elm and Williams Sonoma shop there, but so do thousands of other small retailers from across the globe. The sheer scale of the Villepinte convention center, and the thousands of vendors listed in its directory shows the immense global nature of our business.

But Paris Déco Off is where taste lives, where beauty hasn’t been optimized out of existence by spreadsheets and supply chain consultants. It features the crème de la crème of the industry, surrounded by the beauty of the city.

And here’s Mr Thread’s first ever scoop: Paris Déco Off is about to shake up its leadership, and are actively looking for new blood. Change is coming, and the industry is watching. The current team has done an admirable job running the show, but it feels like fresh blood is needed to inject some new ideas into the show.

Mr. Thread will be walking the shows all week, notebook in hand. Next week: I’ll tell you who said what, who was seen where, and what it all means for your business.

Until then, au revoir.

Agentic AI will finally fix the design industry’s tech mess
Google just announced it’s turning Gemini into a virtual merchant. Ask the chatbot what gear you need for a ski trip, and it returns products from Wayfair, and Shopify. There’s instant checkout without leaving the chat. OpenAI did the same with ChatGPT in October.

This is the arrival of agentic commerce—and it exposes how broken discovery is in the design industry. Try searching Google for “red velvet fabric” right now. You get mostly Amazon junk. None of it is of any real use to a designer hoping to create an elegant sofa.  There’s no unified search engine for quality design products that significantly covers a fraction of what our industry has to offer.

Agentic AI solves this brilliantly. Sit down with an AI system and say: “I need a red velvet. No, a shade lighter. Add a bit of sheen.” It’s conversational, intuitive, and instant. It will solve problems for designers and brands that legacy software never could.

Talking of legacy software, the companies best positioned to build a unified, agentic marketplace are the three that own the design industry’s biggest project management software.

But they're too busy sitting fat and happy on their recurring revenue, and for too long ignored what’s coming. It is partially because they are locked into antiquated codebases, but also they had leadership changes and are no longer owned and led by people that get our industry.

Their software is poorly built, hard to use, and most of their users are creative souls who hate using it.

AI is coming for them, and while they may have finally caught on now, I think it is too late. They’re going the way of the dodo. Their one hope may be monetizing their vast trove of data, but if the users jump ship to better solutions, even that will become worthless.

Here’s the reality: some teenaged coder eating Doritos in Ukraine will vibe code agentic AI business software for interior designers in a weekend. Maybe they already have.

Try-and-buy shoppable hotels and Airbnbs
The Wall Street Journal reports luxury hotels are turning guest rooms into shoppable showrooms. Hotel Anna & Bel in Philadelphia partnered with Anthropologie Home to furnish its $1,000-per-night suite—everything from the $3,298 jacquard sofa to the $1,198 dining table is available via QR code. Design Within Reach launched Wave House in Palm Desert where guests can test-drive and purchase Herman Miller seating. Danish design company Vipp operates 13 bookable guesthouses worldwide where visitors can try modular kitchens starting at $19,000.

The concept isn’t new—Westin pioneered it in 1999 with the Heavenly Bed—but technology has made impulse buying easier. This is “retail as experience,” and it’s working. Nicole Schenk, a Philadelphia nurse practitioner who stayed at Hotel Anna & Bel, told the WSJ it made her “want to redecorate my whole house.”

I love where this is going, especially in a world that is going to become more and more hungry for analog (read anti-AI) experiences.

What is Sandow up to?
Last week I told you Sandow was up to something. Now we have proof. First, the @designshop Instagram account (Material Bank’s interior design division) published a sponsored story with Martyn Lawrence Bullard. This week, Emily Henderson partnered with them on another exclusive video.

Two high-profile designer influencer campaigns in quick succession could mean they've got a massive marketing budget to burn or they're warming up @designshop for something bigger. Or things are worse than we thought, and they're desperately throwing everything at the wall to try and make this long promised solution work.

Leaders of Design acquired DFA. What now?
Keith Granet’s Leaders of Design just acquired the Decorative Furnishings Association, the trade group that’s been dormant since the pandemic. (He probably bought it for less than a used recliner on Craigslist.) The DFA was founded in 1934 and functioned for nearly a century before fading into irrelevance.

It differs from LDS in that it’s strictly for manufacturers and brands, not designers. In other words, it’s a group of competitors (who all insist they aren’t competitors) attempting to collaborate in the name of improving the industry. It sounds a bit like unicorns and rainbows, but if they can make it work, I’d gladly participate. Being in the room with the brilliant leaders of the companies involved alone would make it worthwhile.

Granet told Business of Home he plans to revitalize it with membership fees, new programming, and data insights from Studio Designer, his software platform that logs $5 billion in transactions annually (oh yeah, that one). He’ll offer DFA members aggregated data—how often brands get specified versus purchased, competitive rankings, market intelligence.

The DFA struggled for years to deliver meaningful value beyond networking events and committee meetings. Can this new ownership and a data-driven approach change that? If Granet can actually connect designers, vendors, and real market intelligence, it could work. The industry desperately needs better information sharing. The potential is real. Something interesting could be brewing here.

Let’s see if I get an invite after he reads this piece…

California’s tax plan could trigger a wealth exodus
California is on everyone’s minds here in Paris. Especially news that California lawmakers just backed a tax proposal requiring startup founders to pay wealth taxes on unrealized gains—even if they leave the state. As Austen Allred just wrote on X: “Upon learning their plan would have such a catastrophic outcome, they changed nothing.”

LA and San Francisco are two of the greatest design markets in the world: the perfect combination of taste, creativity, money, and God’s most beautiful land. But this policy threatens it. The entertainment industry is already leaving and billionaires are calculating exit strategies. Sergey Brin and Larry Page are already leaving and taking their fortune with them.

Some estimates say $1T of the $2T tax base has already decided to leave. These are STAGGERING numbers and a catastrophe if true.

If this makes the ballot in June, even the threat of passage accelerates the exodus. You don’t need the law to pass for damage to happen, just the uncertainty is toxic for business. If you’ve invested in California showrooms or sales infrastructure, this should worry you.

California’s design community needs policies that help beauty flourish, not legislation that punishes success and drives talent elsewhere.

What we lost in the fire
Talking of LA, I read this very sobering Elle Decor story about what the city lost in the wildfires. Twenty-four people died—that’s what matters most. But the architectural devastation tells its own tragic story: more than 12,000 structures destroyed, over 20,000 acres scorched. Preservationists are calling it the single worst loss of historic properties in LA’s history.

The Robert Bridges House on Sunset Boulevard—the brutalist masterpiece that seemed to defy gravity, hovering 100 feet above the road on concrete stilts—is gone. The Andrew McNally House, a nine-bedroom Queen Anne Victorian with its famed Turkish Room and hand-painted silk ceiling, burned in Altadena. Ray Kappe’s 1991 Keeler House, a treehouse-like modernist jewel. The Zane Grey Estate, built in 1907 as Altadena’s first fireproof home, was, tragically, not fireproof enough. Will Rogers’ 31-room ranch house overlooking the Pacific. All gone.

The rebuilding will take years. Some of these properties will never return. For designers with LA clients who lost homes, this is your moment. Help them rebuild something worthy of what was lost.

Trump’s housing play: Demand without supply
It’s an election year, and Trump is focused on one of the country’s biggest pain points: the housing crisis. The president unveiled his housing agenda this week—$200 billion in mortgage bond purchases through Fannie and Freddie, a ban on Wall Street firms buying single-family homes, and more talk about portable mortgages that move with you when you sell.

Mortgage rates also fell to their lowest level since 2023 and bond markets reacted immediately. Bill Pulte, Trump's housing czar, is also considering 30 to 50 more ideas to ease the housing crisis.

Here’s the problem: Trump is attacking demand while ignoring supply. “If you’re going to do all these demand-side things and you don’t have any supply-side things, you're going to make the problem even worse,” Ed Pinto of the American Enterprise Institute told the Wall Street Journal. For our industry, watch California and major metros. Lower rates could unlock renovations and second-home purchases among the wealthy—the people who actually spend on design. But institutional money leaving single-family rentals won’t move our needle.

Americans will bet on anything
Polymarket, the world’s largest prediction market, now lets you wager on home prices in Miami and Los Angeles. Markets settle monthly based on Parcl’s daily housing index.

Prediction markets called Trump’s 2024 win when the polls whiffed. Now they’re coming for real estate, delivering forward-looking signals instead of stale comps from three months ago.

People in the design industry should crush this. We have insider knowledge on luxury markets, renovation activity, and client spending patterns. We see what’s happening long before the data catches up. It's almost unfair how much of an edge designers and vendors have here. If you get involved in this, reach out. I want to hear how it goes.

Tech-free rooms are having a moment
Google searches for “how to reduce screen time” hit all-time highs in 2025. Now designers are creating analog rooms—spaces without screens where families play board games, listen to vinyl, and actually talk to each other.

Christine Gachot designed a Montana playroom with a climbing wall. Designer Jeanne Hayes retreats to her attic studio to read newspapers in solitude. One Brooklyn family installed a 1950s phone booth.

I love analog. We have record players throughout our home. Analog photography has a different soul than digital: one of my companies is shifting its entire content strategy toward it over the next few years. There’s something meditative about flipping through records that algorithms can’t replicate, and print photography has a magical quality you can’t manufacture digitally. It’s like that feeling when the needle finds the groove, nothing beats it.

Here’s the opportunity: niche into this. Market yourself as the designer who creates tech-free sanctuaries. Put it on your website. This is a luxury people will pay for: rooms that force presence instead of mindless scrolling. I love the direction these trends are going. Our better instincts are kicking in.

Million Dollar ideas
This AP story about upcycling really lit up my business brain. Designers are turning vintage dressers into kitchen islands, French tables into powder room vanities, and antique cabinets into linen storage. If I was a young, hungry twenty-something trying to make money fast, I’d be out there flipping furniture on Facebook Marketplace and Etsy. But finding a way to do it at SCALE, partnering with a digital marketer who understands how to manipulate the marketplaces.

At least five times a day, I’ll stumble on a new business idea like this and seriously consider dropping everything to pursue it. I’ve been called a serial entrepreneur with shiny object syndrome (guilty as charged.) Common sense usually kicks in after about sixty seconds. But some of these ideas are legitimately good, and Mr Thread seems like the perfect place to share them. Part of our mission at Mr Thread is helping great artists run great businesses. If one of you becomes rich off something you read here, I want to hear about it. I might even invest!

Giving dead brands new life.
Talking of upcycling: Gourmet magazine, shuttered by Condé Nast in 2009, is being relaunched as an independent online newsletter by five 30-something journalists who discovered the trademark had lapsed and claimed it themselves. 

It reminds me of the Shinola story. The shoe polish brand died in 1960. Entrepreneurs claimed the abandoned trademark in 2011 and relaunched it as a Detroit luxury watchmaker. During its first six months in business, Shinola generated more than $20 million in sales.

Then there’s Donghia, the luxury home furnishing company. It was established in 1968, filed for bankruptcy in 2020, and months later, Kravet acquired the Donghia brand name and relaunched it. Everyone in the industry is rooting for a Donghia comeback story. It is a name simply too important to be archived.

It’s got me thinking: What other dead interior design brands are due for a rebirth? Expired trademarks could be a goldmine if you know where to look.

Peruse popular interior paint colors by decade. (Spoiler: depressing)

Former AirBnB founder Joseph Gebbia Jr. is the US government’s first Chief Design Officer. His National Design Studio just dropped a new poster. What an amazing thing to see great design become a priority again for the government.

A cool share from a legend in Amsterdam. Why geometry is used in architecture.

I loved these textural 3D moodboards from London’s de Le Cuona.

This is how the AI slop industrial complex might end, and I’m here for it.

Do you ever feel like someone just reached in and gently touched your soul? Check out these bird pins (brooches) made out of scrap materials by Japanese Americans held in internment camps during World War II. Zoom in and look at the hand brush strokes on the birds. You can feel the beauty emerging from despair.

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