Home Accents Today: The Trade Magazine for the Home Accents Industry Since 1986
Home Accents Today is a monthly trade magazine and website based in Greensboro, North Carolina, serving designers, manufacturers, retailers, e-tailers and interior designers who buy and sell home accents — decorative accessories, accent furniture, wall decor, mirrors, rugs, lamps, lighting, permanent botanicals, soft goods and tabletop. Established in 1986, it is owned by BridgeTower Media and publishes at homeaccentstoday.com. Its ISSN is 1093-0337.
The magazine began as a single page of home accessories coverage inside Furniture Today, grew into a spin-off first called Home Accessories Today, and became Home Accents Today, a national monthly in print and digital formats that also publishes daily issues at the semiannual High Point, Las Vegas and Atlanta home furnishings markets. For nearly 40 years it has been the specialist voice of a product category — the decorative objects that finish a room — within the much larger American home furnishings industry.
Overview
Home Accents Today is a business magazine, not a consumer shelter title. Its readers run stores, design firms and product companies, and its regular features focus on new products, style trends, retail and interior design business operations and strategies, trade industry news and category reports. The magazine also publishes Best of Market editions and daily coverage updates through its website, video content through PBM News Desk, and social media platforms.
Its research is a major part of its value. Home Accents Today publishes exclusive research including consumer buying trends, store operations studies, the Home Accents Universe study sizing the market by product category, Retail Stars features showcasing independent brick-and-mortar retailers, and special reports on home furnishings retail channels, technologies and best practices. For an industry made up largely of small and mid-sized businesses, that proprietary data gives retailers and manufacturers benchmarks they cannot generate themselves.
History and Founding
Home Accents Today was established in 1986. In its own 30th anniversary account in 2016, editor Jenny Heinzen York described its evolution from an occasional print supplement to Furniture Today into an ever-expanding brand encompassing print magazines, digital editions, a website, newsletters, conferences and events, proprietary research, custom content and videos. The commemorative 30th Anniversary special edition, mailed in early September 2016, looked back at 30 years of the home accents industry — product trends, colours, retail and materials — and ahead to the next 30 years, with industry forecasts and a look at the homes of the future.
The human origin story is preserved in the obituary of Mark McMenamin, one of its original editorial staffers. McMenamin, a journalism graduate of Temple University who had managed furniture departments at Horne's and Strawbridge and Clothier department stores, answered a want ad seeking a writer with a journalism degree and retail furniture sales background, moved to North Carolina, and started at Furniture Today when it covered the home accessories business on a single page. That coverage later spun off into Home Accessories Today, and McMenamin stayed with the publication, later renamed Home Accents Today, to cover the accent business — a career that captures how a one-page beat became a standalone national trade magazine.
Publisher and Ownership
Home Accents Today's ownership traces the consolidation of American business media. Former owner Reed Business Information sold the title to Sandow Media, publisher of Worth, in 2010. Progressive Business Media purchased the company in 2013, placing Home Accents Today alongside sister titles including Furniture Today, Home & Textiles Today, Gifts and Decorative Accessories, Home Furnishings News, Casual Living and Kids Today. In 2018, BridgeTower Media acquired Progressive Business Media, and Home Accents Today is now owned by BridgeTower Media, with editorial offices in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Greensboro and neighbouring High Point are the historic heart of the American furniture industry and home of the High Point Market, the industry's largest trade show, so the magazine's North Carolina base places its journalists inside the market they cover. BridgeTower Media, a business media company, positions the title within a portfolio of trade publications, with Furniture Today as its closest sibling — a relationship that recently produced the acquisition of Furniture, Lighting & Décor described below.
Editorial Content and Sections
Editorially, the magazine mixes product, trend and business coverage. Product coverage introduces new accents across its categories — lighting, rugs, mirrors, wall decor, accent furniture, permanent botanicals, soft goods and tabletop — with photography that retailers use to plan assortments. Style and trend reporting tracks colours, materials and looks moving through the markets. Business reporting covers retail operations and strategy, interior design business practice, e-commerce, technology and the economics of independent retail, aimed at owners who must be buyers, marketers and employers at once.
Standing features give the title its identity. Retail Stars showcases independent brick-and-mortar retailers, honouring stores that succeed against national chains and online competition. The Home Accents Universe research sizes the accents market by product category, giving the industry a shared picture of itself. Category reports go deep on single segments such as lighting or rugs. Market coverage is a season unto itself: daily issues at the High Point, Las Vegas and Atlanta markets, Best of Market editions, and web and video updates that follow buyers through the showrooms.
Audience and Circulation
The audience is the trade itself: designers, manufacturers and buyers, including retailers, e-tailers and interior designers, of home accents in the United States. It is a national issue, published monthly in print and digital formats, reaching store owners and buyers who attend the major markets and the vendors who sell to them. For advertisers — accents manufacturers and importers — the magazine offers concentrated access to the people who decide what American stores stock in decorative categories.
That trade audience shapes the tone. Readers are professionals who know the products, so coverage assumes fluency and concentrates on what is new, what is selling and how successful operators run their businesses. The Retail Stars programme works because the audience is a community: being named a Retail Star is peer recognition inside a relatively small industry, and the stores profiled become case studies for other readers facing the same pressures from e-commerce and changing consumer taste.
Print and Digital Editions
In print, Home Accents Today publishes monthly national issues in both print and digital formats, supplemented by the daily market issues produced at the semiannual High Point, Las Vegas and Atlanta home furnishings markets — an unusual print commitment that puts a fresh paper product in buyers' hands during the days when orders are actually written. Best of Market editions distil those markets afterwards.
Digitally, homeaccentstoday.com carries daily coverage updates, product and industry news, video through PBM News Desk and research and report content, supported by social media distribution and newsletters. The brand's 2016 anniversary description already listed digital editions, website, newsletters, conferences and events, proprietary research, custom content and videos alongside print, showing a trade publisher that had moved to a full brand model in which the monthly magazine is the anchor product among several. Conferences and events extend that model into face-to-face industry gatherings.
Notable Editors and Contributors
Susan Dickenson served as editor-in-chief of Home Accents Today, with Tracy Bulla as senior style director, Alexa Boschini as managing editor and Thomas Lester as business editor in the title's Progressive Business Media-era masthead. Jenny Heinzen York, who wrote the magazine's 30th anniversary editorial in 2016, guided the brand through its expansion into research, events and video. More recently, Allison Zisko is editor-in-chief, quoted in that role when Home Accents Today absorbed Furniture, Lighting & Décor coverage.
Mark McMenamin deserves a place in any account of the magazine's people. One of the original editorial staffers of the spin-off from Furniture Today, he covered the accent business from its single-page era, later worked at InFurniture and as market editor at Interior Design, and died in August 2022 at 60. His obituary in Home Accents Today itself, including the memory of a market week when Paul McCartney appeared to support his daughter Heather's new exhibitor line and the trade press were the only press left in the room, preserves the flavour of the market world the magazine chronicles.
Awards and Recognition
Home Accents Today's best-known recognition programme is one it gives rather than receives: Retail Stars, its showcase of independent brick-and-mortar retailers, is a standing honour within the home accents trade, and its Universe research and special reports are cited as industry references. The magazine's market dailies and Best of Market editions function as a record of each season's recognised products and trends at High Point, Las Vegas and Atlanta.
Institutionally, the title's survival and repeated acquisition tell their own story. Reed Business Information, Sandow Media, Progressive Business Media and BridgeTower Media each judged Home Accents Today worth owning between 2010 and 2018, and trade coverage of the recent Furniture, Lighting & Décor combination described the two merging brands as powerhouses in home furnishings publishing. A specialist title approaching 40 years of continuous publication in a consolidating industry has been recognised, in effect, by every owner who chose to continue it.
Recent Developments
The most significant recent development is the combination with Furniture, Lighting & Décor. Furniture Today acquired that trade publication from Scranton Gillette Communications, and a reimagined and redesigned Home Accents Today debuted with dramatically expanded coverage of the lighting industry, giving long-time Furniture, Lighting & Décor readers the coverage they expected inside Home Accents Today. Familiar Furniture, Lighting & Décor features and columns, such as the Design Coaching Center and Technology Watch, were to continue, and Home Accents Today's enhanced website houses historical coverage from Furniture, Lighting & Décor as well as access to its past monthly issues.
BridgeTower Media chief executive Hal Cohen described excitement about combining two great brands to provide more value to readers and advertisers, and editor-in-chief Allison Zisko described the redesigned title as incorporating the best of both brands while continuing the home décor industry coverage Home Accents Today has delivered for nearly 40 years. The merger reflects the wider economics of trade publishing: fewer, stronger titles with broader category coverage, in this case uniting general accents with the large and technical lighting category.
Place in Home Furnishings Media
Home accents are the part of the furnishings business most driven by fashion — colour, material and motif change by season — and the part where independent retailers remain most important. Home Accents Today exists to serve that ecosystem: it tells a store buyer in the Midwest what sold in High Point, tells a manufacturer what retailers are asking for, and tells the whole trade, through its Universe research, how big each category really is.
From a single page in Furniture Today to a monthly national magazine with market dailies, research programmes, events and a newly absorbed lighting title, Home Accents Today has grown with the category it named. Its Greensboro base, its BridgeTower ownership and its nearly four decades of publication make it the continuing trade record of America's decorative home business.
