Mymaison Redesigns The Online World Of Furnishing Homes Finding Home Furnishings Is Now Fun and Foolproof

Furniture World Magazine

Finally, finding home furnishings is fun, foolproof and focused on what consumers need and want most: an easy and entertaining way to shop confidently in one place for brands they know and trust according to their own personal styles. MyMaison (www.MyMaison.com) has put consumers in the "designer's seat," giving them the sources and resources they need to buy furnishings for their homes in a way that fits their busy and independent lifestyles. "We like to think of MyMaison as the true 'Declaration of Independence' for home decorating," said Lisa David, president and CEO of the company. "MyMaison gives consumers the freedom and ease to design and shop their own way, on their own time and in the comfort of their home with the confidence that can only come from buying trusted and known brands," David added. "Today, the U.S. furniture and furnishings industry is more than a $200 billion business in the real world. By 2004, it is expected that five percent of all furniture sales, $3.9 billion, will be made online," she noted. (Forrester Research) "But despite its size and its importance to every consumer, frustration is certainly a word you can use to describe the consumer's general experience with decorating and buying home furnishings." Based on findings from research conducted by the Home Furnishings Council (HFC), consumers have some very specific complaints about shopping and decorating, which MyMaison plans to tackle. In HFC studies, consumers reported: Poor merchandise selection and quality High-pressure and untrained sales people Tiresome and time-consuming traveling from store to store to find what they really want and need And when consumers do finally find what they want, they get it home and all too often find it is the wrong color, size or style. "Our goal in creating MyMaison was to address each of these concerns and make designing, decorating and shopping an engaging and entertaining experience for consumers," David said. Brands Consumers Can Trust: Going from store to store, trying to coordinate a sofa at home with a table in the mall and a lamp at a boutique can leave the typical consumer frustrated and confused. That's why MyMaison has established arrangements with 11 well-known retailers – with more on the way. Current retailer partners are: Basil Street Galleries, Design Toscano, Domain Home Fashions, Exposures, Exposures Homes, Gump's (gumps.com), Homes for Living,, Kitchen & Home (kitchenandhome.com), NextMonet.com, Rue de France and Shades of Light. Color Coordination Perfected: Now, consumers can be sure that the color they see online is the color they want or the color they need to match with other things in their home, thanks to an exclusive partnership between MyMaison.com and Pantone, Inc. the world's leading color expert. Together they have developed the MyMaison.com Color Guide, a fan guide filled with 1,757 uniquely coded colors that consumers can use to coordinate colors in their home with colors online while seeing what colors online really look like. For years, the PANTONE, Color System has enabled designers and manufacturers worldwide to specify and communicate accurate color in the graphics, textile and plastics industries. With the exclusive MyMaison.com Color Guide, consumers now have access to the same exacting PANTONE Color standards. The $19.95 MyMaison.com Color Guide is only available at www.MyMaison.com. Finding Their Own Design Style: Decorating a home can be a daunting task. With that in mind, MyMaison offers a 10-question personality quiz – the Design Style Quiz – to help consumers discover their personal style. Based on The Domain Book of Intuitive Home Design by Judy George, chairman and CEO of Domain Home Fashions, the quiz helps consumers determine whether they're an Artisan, Visionary, Idealist or Adventurer – or a combination. The site then allows them to shop according to their style. Making Real Rooms : Another nagging problem is judging how new furnishings will work in a room with things they already have. With the "Create-a-Room" tool, consumers can import any merchandise from the site into the "virtual" room they are decorating online. The piece is scaled to the dimensions of the room, allowing people to actually see how things will look side-by-side. Wall and floor colors, lighting and other accessories can be added to these virtual rooms and the room designs can be e-mailed to friends and family for a "second opinion." Shopping Online Couldn't Be Easier: MyMaison makes it easy for consumers to shop the way they choose: By Item, Room, Retailer, Design Style or Showcase Rooms. High-resolution images illustrate each item. Double clicking on an image will not only enlarge it for a better look, but will also provide a description of the piece, including details like dimensions, materials and pricing. Shoppers also benefit from having one Shopping Cart that accommodates all retailers and being able to get assistance from trained online and phone customer care representatives. MyMaison is a unique and entertaining way to browse and buy for the home online with the confidence that comes from known and trusted retailers, expert color coordination, personal design style identification and decorating technology linking in-home and online-home design. For more information, visit www.MyMaison.com or phone 800-710-9017. With more than 37 years of experience, Pantone, Inc. is recognized as the worldwide market leader in color communication and Internet color technology for the graphic design, printing, publishing, textile and plastics industries. Additional information about Pantone is available on the company's web site at www.pantone.com or by calling Pantone at 888-PANTONE.