Seventy-five thousand attendees. Two thousand exhibitors. More than 12 million square feet of show space. To state the obvious: High Point Market is big. In recent years, the biannual trade show has only gotten bigger as its audience has swelled beyond furniture industry pros to include thousands of interior designers. For the most part, brands are trying to get in, not out. This spring, however, Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams is doing just that. For the first time since launching three decades ago, the home furnishings brand won’t be showing its new pieces in North Carolina.

Which is not to say it won’t be showing at all. Instead, Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams will welcome visitors to an immersive three-day pop-up in Brooklyn’s Industry City in early April, just weeks before High Point Spring Market.

The move is part of a larger plan that has been in the works for a while, says CEO Allison O’Connor, who joined the company in June 2019. “We started thinking about this last summer as we were approaching Market in October—thinking about different ways to present the brand,” she tells Business of Home. “We decided to take this opportunity forward in a very exciting new way.”

Why Brooklyn? The location is the nexus of the many stakeholders the brand hopes to attract to view its new collection, including press, retail partners, contract and hospitality firms, and residential design firms that may not include High Point in their yearly calendar of design destinations.

“It’s also the heartland of what’s happening in design, and is a beautiful environment where we can show our collection as people look out over the water at the Statue of Liberty,” says O’Connor. “We wanted to focus on the different channels of business we have and speak to them on a personal level. The genesis of this [shift] was that we felt we weren’t including as many partners as we could. This allows us to not only continue our partnerships with existing folks, but to open up for a much larger audience.”