Giftware
Las Vegas Market Adds Seasonal and Gift Resources
Las Vegas Market has made significant gift and seasonal leasing gains with more than 102,000 square feet of new, expanded and relocated showrooms confirmed for 2019 Las Vegas Winter Market, running Jan. 27 – Jan. 31, 2019. Additionally, the temporary exhibits in the Pavilions at Las Vegas Market are experiencing notable growth with the Market’s largest-ever GIFT and HANDMADE presentations, and a sold-out DESIGN LIFESTYLE section.
“The number of seasonal and gift resources continue to grow at Las Vegas Market,” said Leanna John, Director of Leasing for International Market Centers. “Since 2012, Las Vegas Market has experienced unprecedented growth with a 223 percent increase in gift buyer attendance and a 240% increase in seasonal buyer attendance.”
New-to-Market showrooms include: AC+F, a supplier of custom-made ornaments, in 1,300 square feet on C7; Jaco of America, a wholesaler of unique glass jewelry and glass figurines, in 1,110 square feet on C9; and Katherine’s Collection, a supplier of handcrafted holiday décor, is returning to Las Vegas Market in 2,040 square feet on C9 after a six-year hiatus.
Existing tenants are relocating or expanding their showrooms this Winter. On C6, three-company collective “Best of Show” is expanding to 7,500 square feet.
On C7, Timeless by Designs, a provider of wholesale giftware products, is relocating to 5,093 square feet; and Las Vegas Market anchor Creative Co-Op is more than doubling its former showroom space and introducing a new “Creative Commons” lounge. The expansion will create a 28,000-square-foot showroom for the Creative Co-Op, Bloomville and ILLUME brands. These relocations and expansions support Las Vegas Market’s remerchandising of C7, which offers buyers a more cohesive gift and seasonal presentation and supports the growth of existing tenants as well as renewals, expansions and relocations of other exhibitors. Other notable exhibitors on C7 include: C&F Enterprises, K&K Interiors and Primitives by Kathy.
On C8, Bearington Collection, a supplier of teddy bears and baby products, is relocating and expanding to 2,293 square feet; multi-line agency Next Step Reps is expanding to 24,000 square feet; and OneCoast, a provider of gift, home, fashion accessories and collegiate products, is expanding to 17,604 square feet to showcase Mud Pie products.
On C9, Melrose International, a wholesaler of giftware, holiday, home décor and silk florals, is expanding 66 percent to 11,100 square feet; and Portman, a supplier of high-quality accessories and apparel, relocated to 2,300 square feet.
In addition to permanent showrooms, temporary gift and home décor in the Pavilions at Las Vegas Market are pacing at an all-time high. The GIFT category in Pavilion 1 will feature more than 180 exhibitors in 35,000 square feet this winter, a 10 percent increase from 2018 Winter Market and the largest-ever presentation in GIFT. New-to-Market gift and seasonal exhibitors include: Beacon Designs, S4 Lights, Holidynamics, MeadowBrook Gourds, and Mascot International, Inc. and Vermont Christmas Company. Other notable resources include: AA Floral; Character’s Unlimited; The Christmas Place; Cosmo Gifts Corp; Decor N’ Beyond; Flora Bunda; Gift Bliss; The Handcrafted; Pampean Art Glass; Nestled Pines Woodworking; The Rose Lady; Santa’s Workshop; and Tony International. Additionally, GIFT will feature the return of Artisanal LA.
The HANDMADE category will also feature its largest-ever presentation at Winter Market with 9,000 square feet of space. Notable vendors with seasonal and gift products in HANDMADE include: A. Primary, Danforth Pewter, Green Tree Jewelry, Pilgrim Imports and Silk Road Bazaar. Additionally, HANDMADE will also showcase the return of Aid to Artisans, which has confirmed participation from eight companies.
The sold-out DESIGN LIFESTYLE section will showcase 30 companies across 3,200 square feet. New and notable exhibitors include: American Design Club, Cognitive Surplus, Cose Nuove, Dock and Bay, Fiorentina, and Nambe.
In Pavilion 2, DISCOVERIES: The Antique Vintage Marketplace will feature more than 15,000 square feet of antiques, found objects and one-of-a-kind vintage resources. Notable exhibitors with seasonal and gift products include: The BNB Craft; Broke Jewels; Forever Green Art; Lyla Bleu; Peppermint Charms; Stone Soup Santas; and Vintage Addiction.
Las Vegas Market is the leading home furnishings and gift market in the western U.S., presenting 4,000+ gift, home décor and furniture resources in an unrivaled market destination. Las Vegas Market features thousands of gift, furniture and home décor lines, allowing for cross-category commerce among these industries. Winter 2019 Las Vegas Market runs January 27-31, 2019. For more information, visit www.lasvegasmarket.com.
Ayesha Cookware Adds New Basil Green Color
The recently launched Ayesha Cookware line expands with a new color, Basil Green. Introduced at retail nationwide in fall 2017, the Ayesha Home Collection Porcelain Enamel Cookware line is part of a comprehensive Ayesha Curry kitchen lifestyle brand offered by Meyer Corporation, U.S., in collaboration with rising culinary star Ayesha Curry. Ayesha Curry’s eponymous line of casually sophisticated kitchenware available at retail now includes cookware, bakeware, stoneware, cast iron, cutlery, pantryware, and kitchen tools and gadgets.
New Basil Green – inspired by Curry’s love of gardening and bringing the calming benefits of nature into home environments – is the fourth color in the Ayesha Cookware collection, which also includes Twilight Teal, Sienna Red, and Brown Sugar.
Ayesha Curry – who resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, Stephen Curry, and young family – worked closely with Meyer to create quality kitchen products at accessible prices that are effortlessly stylish, and make cooking simple and fun. According to Ayesha Curry, home cooking brings friends and families together, and her main goal in launching her new line is to encourage everyone to spend time in the kitchen.
Ayesha Cookware is made of quick and even-heating aluminum with durable porcelain enamel exteriors. For beautiful contrast, the interior surface of the cookware in new Basil Green, Twilight Teal and Sienna Red is silver color nonstick, while the Brown Sugar cookware interior surface is copper color nonstick. The stylish pan bodies slightly taper at the base and gently flare to the top to add casual elegance and a chic touch to weeknight meal-making and entertaining. Ayesha Cookware’s innovative diamond-textured interior surface and long-lasting high quality nonstick delivers better browning, easier food release, and convenient cleanup. Shatter-resistant glass lids and dual-riveted brushed stainless steel handles with polished accents complete the look. Ideal for stovetop and oven use, Ayesha Home Collection Porcelain Enamel Cookware is oven safe to 500 degrees Fahrenheit and comes with a lifetime warranty.
Ayesha Home Collection Porcelain Enamel in new Basil Green is available now at retailers nationwide and includes a 12-piece set and a 12-inch Covered Deep Skillet with Helper Handle that’s offered as open stock.
Ayesha Cookware kitchenware helps support No Kid Hungry® to provide up to 500,000 meals to children in need. Learn more at nokidhungry.org/onedollar. For further information about Ayesha Curry kitchen products, consumers are welcome to visit www.ayeshacurrykitchenware.com.
Norlan Debuts Whisky Tumbler for Drinkers Who Add Ice
Whisky product innovator Norlan is launching its newest product: the Rauk Heavy Tumbler. The international brand is dedicated to advancing the whisky drinking experience through products informed by design, science, and ritual. While the company’s original whisky glass was developed through fluid dynamics to reduce ethanol and enhance aroma delivery for purists who drink neat, the new tumbler was designed with two users in mind: those who prefer their whisky chilled with ice, and the adventurous crafted cocktail maker.
Taking its name from the Old Scottish word for “Rock,” the new Rauk Heavy Tumbler was developed by Icelandic designer and Norlan co-founder Sruli Recht. For whisky drinkers who prefer their spirit chilled in a heavy-bottom glass, the tumbler, weighing in at 575 grams, will delight. And for those who revel in the crafted cocktail, the tumbler features a core innovation. Inside the glass lies an array of extruded chevrons radiating from the center, which serve to provide friction points for gripping ingredients used in muddled drinks.
Circumventing the ornamentation of traditional cut crystal, the entire surface of the tumbler, inside and out, is born in a single blinding moment of machine-pressing the molten crystal into a complex five-part mold. Within this process, the plunger forms the multi-chevron cross-shaped extrusion inside the glass. The chevrons of this specific pattern evolved through dozens of design iterations in search of an elegant and ideal form to aid in the art of cocktail making while visually reinforcing the compass shape on the underside of the glass.
Glassmaking is a form of both alchemy and art, a process often at odds with the precise digital modeling at the disposal of today’s designer. While the tumbler’s base is precision-modeled as a three-dimensional form allowing the glass to rest on four crystal points as though it were floating, perfecting this in mass production is a more nuanced process.
Combining the thickness of the glass bottom with this particular base, along with the desired thinness of the rim, required numerous rounds of sampling and even in production necessitates a delicate balancing act of timing and intuition during the machine-pressing process to keep the tumbler from either cracking or sinking on its feet. “Creating not just another rocks glass is about the perversion of form,” says Recht. “We wanted to craft an object that excited not just the user, but us as well.”
The Rauk Heavy Tumbler is sold individually and retails for $50.
Some Nifty Finds at Las Vegas Market for Entertaining at Home and Beyond
By Robin Mather
When your customers mention entertaining at home, are they thinking about strictly within the four walls of their own houses? Or are they also planning what we’ve come to think of as entertaining-at-home-adjacent — the upscale picnic that goes to the concert in the park, or dinner on the dock, or the day at the beach, or the kids’ birthday party anywhere but home?
Though retailers haven’t focused specifically on that trend, we saw a number of items at the recent Las Vegas Market that work especially well for entertaining away from home. The manufacturers we met agreed that their customers, especially their Millennial and younger customers, adore the idea of entertaining in locations away from their homes.
While wine glass charms have been around for some time, Going Stemless offers super-powered magnet single charms and sets of charms so guests can identify their own glasses. A stainless steel magnet goes inside the glass, and the dangling brightly-colored charm clips onto the outside. The benefit here is that these adorable little charms also work on the kind of glasses we often take on picnics: the iconic red Solo cup. The company’s best seller is a beach-themed set of five charms with a suggested retail price of $21.95.
Two items from the Di Potter line are perfect for an elegant dinner outside the home. Wine glass shades rest on any wine glass; drop in a battery-powered tealight, and you’ve got an instant, upscale, safe light for an intimate dinner. With a suggested retail of $18 for a set of six, they’re an affordable addition to your customers’ entertaining pantry. The Bottle Light, a battery-powered light that drops into a wine, champagne or water bottle, casts a dreamy, soft light that is especially appealing. Using three AA batteries, Bottle Light’s batteries will last 80 to 100 hours of use, or customers can replace them with a rechargeable USB power source (suggested retail price $30). The Bottle Light is available in clear and colored versions; suggested retail price is $30 for clear and $50 for a color option that allows you to choose from a number of colors.
Messermeister has introduced a line of knives with cheery colored handles, in red, orange, yellow, green, blue and black. The six-inch cheese and tomato knife (suggested retail $7.95) has a slightly serrated blade, which makes it ideal for soft foods such as fruits, vegetables and cheeses, as well as harder foods such as baguettes and firmer cheeses. Holes in the blade keep soft foods from sticking, and its pronged tip makes serving sliced cheeses easy, too.
JK Adams, makers of cutting and carving boards, also has a line of just-the-right-size cheese and cutting boards made from maple, ash and other fine woods. Suggested retail prices start at around $12 for these little guys, and retailers can offer personalization at an additional cost.
Sophistiplate showed a line of handsome and especially sturdy paper plates and cutlery, available in a wide range of colors and patterns. Ruffled edges on some pieces make an especially charming place setting, and 70-piece sets for service for 10, including plates, bowls, napkins and cutlery are available with a suggested retail price of $39.99.
Twine Living continues its seaside line of picnic helpers, including a tidy ticking striped picnic blanket with a waterproof lining and four stakes to secure its sturdy grommeted corners. The blanket comes with a handsome leather carrier to make toting it to its destination easier. With a suggested retail price of $49.99, the blanket would be a welcome addition to the entertaining away from home closet.
Kitchenware to Streamline Millennial Lives
By Lorrie Baumann
Millennials are grown up, becoming parents and even sending their youngest children off to school now, and kitchenware and housewares manufacturers are responding to their current needs with products to streamline their experiences in the kitchen while also allowing them to be certain of what they’re eating and what they’re feeding their children. That same Millennial need to be certain of the value of what they’re feeding their children is also spurring growth for organic food, personal care products and fibers, which are all seeing a boom that’s not expected to bust any time soon.
For the household, that need is being fulfilled by take-along food containers that can be filled with grass-fed yogurt or organic butternut squash soup and then tossed into a school lunchbox without much fear that they’ll leak all over last night’s math homework all the way up to a picnic cooler from Built NY that’s designed to take on the weekend-in-the-woods competition with YETI’s soft-sided cooler totes at a more attractive price point. Many of these offerings will be launching this year at the International Home + Housewares Show, scheduled for March 10-13 at McCormick Place in Chicago, Illinois.
Goods for the On-the-Go
Pack-It is in this mix of products designed to appeal to active and health-conscious Millennial consumers with its new Freezable Double Wine Bag, which comes out of a night in the freezer with enough chill power to keep two bottles of wine cold for up to 10 hours. It has an over-the-shoulder design in nontoxic poly canvas with an interior gel divider to provide 360-degree cooling for the bottles inside and a webbed strap. It comes in two fabric colors: the multicolored Blanket Stripe and Sophie, which is a charcoal gray herringbone tweed look. Both have black stripes. The Freezable Double Wine Bag will retail for $21.99.
Also new is Pack-It’s Freezable Can Cooler Backpack, which will chill 18 12-ounce cans or a family meal and keep it cool for three or more hours with Pack-It’s new Radiant Shield Technology. A welded inner liner allows for the addition of extra ice in a leak-proof interior that cleans up easily. A front zipper pocket will hold car keys and a cell phone while a top zipper pocket provides storage for napkins and eating utensils. Like other Pack-It products, it folds flat to go in the freezer or for storage between uses. It’s available in either Charcoal or Navy Buffalo.
GoodCook brings its Meals on the Run collection with a whole range of sizes and styles of containers with silicone-sealed locking lids to keep food safe in backpack or purse. One of the coolest of these is a double-decker container that unfolds to hold a sandwich in one half and the lettuce and tomatoes or sliced fruit or sticks of rabbit food in the other half. The collection even includes a bento box container with eating utensils included. They’re all sold individually with retail prices ranging from $3.99 to $8.99.
For even stronger leak-proof performance, there’s the EMSA Clip&Go containers, high-end containers offered in the U.S. through a partnership between Bradshaw Industries and German manufacturer EMSA. Freezable and microwavable, these plastic containers are engineered with integral silicone seals in their lids that leave no gaps, so the containers are airtight, leak-proof and impenetrable by germs. Foods stored in the containers have been tested and proven to stay fresh twice as long in these containers during refrigerator storage, compared to foods stored under plastic wrap, according to the company. They’re virtually indestructible and guaranteed to last a minimum of 30 years, with suggested retail prices ranging from $2.99 to $9.99.
At the top end of this spectrum is the BUILT NY Welded Cooler Bag from Lifetime Brands, which is constructed with a leak-proof body and welded seams of a heavy-duty material similar to that used for whitewater rafts, so that it will, according to BUILT NY, keep its contents cold for days. Its zippered top opens out to create an opening about the diameter of a bushel basket, so it’s easy either to clean or to load in 10 pounds of ice along with 18 cans of soda or up to 30 pounds of ice alone. It has a padded, adjustable strap and reinforced side handles, an attached bottle opener and multiple tie-down points. Clearly aimed at shoppers who will also be looking at YETI Hopper soft-sided cooler bags, the BUILT NY Welded Cooler Bag is a pound and a half lighter than the comparable-size Hopper bag and will retail for $179.99.
Can’t-Miss Kitchenware
For inside the kitchen, Instant Pot is coming out with a new model called the Instant Pot Max that’s the first small household pressure cooker on the market that can develop 15 pounds of pressure per square inch and maintain it for extended periods, so it can be used for pressure-canning of low-acid products as well as for the everyday multi-cooking that has built a cult following for Instant Pot. Available to ship in April, the Instant Pot Max has a 6-quart capacity – that’s total capacity; it won’t accommodate six quart-size canning jars – and offers touch screen controls and an automatic stirrer for an easy risotto or bone broth as well as button-controlled venting so the user doesn’t have to reach over the pot to the valve to release the pressure.
Thirteen safety features – more than offered by previous Instant Pot models – keep the device safe for the kitchen, and a lid detection indicator is designed to prevent the frustration that some novice users have reported to the company after their pressure cooker has refused to operate because the lid wasn’t properly secured. It’ll retail for around $200.
Robinson Home Products is bringing out a couple of lines of tools and utensils that are of particular interest. The Studio Cuisine collection is a line of utensils with handles in faux natural materials. They’re made with hydrographic printing, a new technology that creates designs that mimic the look of natural wood, yet they’re sturdy and durable. A line with handles that mimic granite will be coming out soon. Pieces retail for $4.99 and up.
Robinson Home Products’ Craft Kitchen is a brand of gadgets, cookware and casual dinnerware designed to appeal to the Millennial foodie. The gadgets are the classic essentials – peeler, whisk and so on, in matte steel with black acacia wood handles, designed for a retro look but updated to be ergonomic for a combination of solid performance and a satisfying feel in the hand. The pieces offer a lifetime guarantee on all items, and they’ll be ready to ship in June.
Progressive is bringing out a couple of really cool unitasker gadgets for its PL8 line of premium kitchenware products. The patented Flip-Blade Avocado Tool has a retractable blade that halves and slices avocados safely, a pit remover and a silicone scoop all in one easy-to-store tool that’s dishwasher safe. The Core & Peel Apple Tool has a hollow metal tube to core apples or pears and an integrated peeler mechanism that slides out to eject the core and then peel the fruit. The peeler locks into position for safety, and this gadget is also dishwasher-safe.
DKB Household USA is offering its own handy unitasker with the Zyliss 2-in-1 Pepper Corer. This handy little gadget is designed to hollow out a bell pepper or a jalapeno with a turn of the wrist to make stuffed peppers an easier standby. It’s easy to store, easy to clean, and it’s dishwasher safe. It’ll retail fro $9.99. The Zyliss Twist & Scoop Grapefruit Tool is designed specifically to segment clean cuts of grapefruit with its built-in corer and double-sided stainless steel blade. The corer locks inside the scoop for compact storage, and it’s dishwasher-safe.
The Negg is another handy unitasker. This little gadget makes child’s play out of peeling perfect hard-cooked eggs. It’s a plastic container with silicone caps, molded with little knobs on its inside wall. The user drops the egg inside the container, adds a little water, caps it and shakes it for a minute or two to knock the egg around against the plastic knobs. The shell shatters, staying attached to its inner membrane, so it peels off the egg with a minimum of effort, leaving behind an unpocked egg.
Bonnie Tyler, who invented this work of genius, says she had the idea after she had foolishly volunteered to bring a dozen deviled eggs to a potluck, only to discover after her eggs had been cooked that the shells wouldn’t peel off the whites without leaving divots. She knew immediately that there just had to be a better way, so she went to work to figure out what that might be. She did some research into how industrial food processors shell hard-cooked eggs, came up with an idea for a home kitchen version, and got together with business partner Sheila Torgan, who knows how to do computer-assisted design. The two of them had worked together for decades on branding and marketing, but Tyler had a yen to produce a tangible product of her own, and Torgan was all in.
They used the 3-D printer in their local public library to produce their first prototypes, and when they had a product that was ready to bring to market, they arranged to have it manufactured in Connecticut and started selling it on HSN, where Tyler just has to demonstrate how easily it produces perfect results to do land-office business at a retail price of $17.95. It’s dishwasher safe and available in seven colors.
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