handcrafts

NEW YORK, NY; August 14, 2023—NY NOW, once known as the NY International Gift Fair, is in the best sense a more compact show than pre-Covid.

Producer Emerald Expositions has streamlined a show that prior to the pandemic was already losing some of its mojo to the huge and unwieldy Atlanta [Gift & Accessories] Market by offering vendors more smaller exhibiting options while the larger exhibitors have reduced the space they have on the show floor.

Also, some of the exhibitors that were previously housed in shows co-located with NY NOW have simply been incorporated here, including many letterpress companies.

It all works, since the store buyers are largely the same, though I did not speak to buyers to get a sense of how they find the re-constituted format. Overall, for me, the show has a more curated feel to it.

Those half-booths and tabletops are better suited to the startups that have always made this show interesting. To paraphrase New York’s WFUV-FM, discovery starts here.

Key to NY NOW’s current feel at the Javits Center (it runs through Wednesday afternoon 8/16/23) is also the integration of those smaller booths alongside the larger ones rather than relegating them to the sides or rear of the hall. It makes for much better exploring and heightens the opportunity for sussing out those new vendors and products.

Mind you, the show still has over 1000 exhibitors. Small is a relative term.

I hadn’t attended since February 2020, just before Covid shut down the exposition industry (not to mention everything else).

In 2020 cannabis and CBD products were widely offered; there were still vendors in those segments this year, but they weren’t an overwhelming presence. That could be a function of being more dispersed in the room. Or perhaps it just got more specialized, with a focus on, for example, mushrooms, including such offerings as Popadelics (crunchy mushroom chips, already available at Walmart and elsewhere); SuperMush bottled mouth sprays and mints; and Immorel Beverages, a line of sparkling teas “helping the general population access the powerful benefits of mushrooms without the bullshit of wellness culture.” Well, well, well, indeed.

From a design standpoint, two looks jumped out at me: High gloss on homewares, including Graziani’s Meloria ball candles which, except for their size, could be mistaken for pool balls, and Fine Lumens’s “personal lights” that might be used as a supersized flashlight or a desk/night table lamp; and fluted (Origami’s ceramic drip coffee makers) and spiral elements (Morocco’s Apartment F candle sticks and vases).

A few individual products:

Palmpress’s collapsible, light weight silicone and steel single-cup coffee maker, which requires no paper (or other) filters. Ideal for travel or an office.

Two items that speak to my previous life as a rock and roll critic: Wicker Woodworks’s LP storage cubes and related furniture; and a New York Pop garbage can from Cussso satirizing a certain New York newspaper to which I contributed for 12 years.

Finally, I didn’t know that doggie bath bombs are a thing, but apparently they are; perhaps more surprising is that there are cat bath bombs, too. I guess anything to get kitty into the water???

NEW YORK, NY; February 5, 2020—In: Cannabis and CBD products, including specialty packaging companies catering to that market. Out: Reusable straws, at least from a fancy design standpoint, now that they’re commodified. And here are my finds for new products well suited for licensing, and others ripe for expanding existing licensed offerings.

SEPTEMBER 1, 2016; NEW YORK, NY—NY NOW is a hybrid gift and home accessories show with a nod toward handcrafted (or maybe better thought of as “small batch”) goods. I concentrated on the latter this time around at the Javits Center here, because sometimes the handcrafted goods are harbingers of things to come from the mass producers or inspire fresh thinking about staid licensed categories. That’s where stealing smart begins.

One of the trends gleaned here: Fresh takes on incorporating discarded/recycled/reclaimed materials. This movement waxes and wanes, without ever totally disappearing. But I came across some innovative examples:

√ Stacey Lee Webber works with coins and found metal objects to create art pieces. Pictured are what she was showing at NY NOW, including a framed display of Abraham Lincoln busts cut from pennies and of nickel buffalo roaming. Not on display but worth taking a look at on her website is a chainsaw fabricated from pennies. Looks like it even works.

√ Attic Journals uses old book covers, bingo cards, floppy disks and other items as covers for its journals, and incorporates parts of books and old library “book due” cards for its jewelry.

√ People for Urban Progress (PUP) makes “goods for good,” rescuing “discarded materials [and] redesigning them for public benefit” in Indianapolis. They started in 2008 making messenger bags and other items with material salvaged when the RCA Dome was torn down. The bags, in particular, have a great distinctive look and, if you will, vibe. Product sales benefit various projects the non-profit supports as well as local artists, designers, and others involved in creating them.

√ Swell Fellow is a Montreal-based company specializing in high-end ties and bow-ties for men (there are a few selections au feminine), some of which feature Scrabble tiles, keyboard keys, and miniature toy pieces such as cans of paint or a Coke bottle. A few ties have a pocket to accommodate a cell phone as part of the fashion accessory.

This one is only tangentially about recycling (“Give old clothes new life!”):

Patricia Vogel and Dominique Serrano’s Button makes . . . buttons. It was late afternoon and I’m thinking snack — when I see this display that looks like very artsy macarons. Well, they’re buttons, hand made in Chile, and they’re sold individually as brooches and buttons, or in pairs, with magnet backing, to use to tie a scarf or spiff up old clothes.

OK, not as good as a macaron, but refreshing in its own way.

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