At ThinkLab, our passion lies at the intersection of specification and design, where we use research to improve communications between designers and manufacturers. Today, that research is helping companies within the interiors industry make critical business decisions as we face economic uncertainty. Here, we share some recent data and insights from our Industry Impact Survey—an ongoing research initiative that we invite you to participate in.
The major impacts on the U.S. economy as a result of COVID-19 began in March 2020. Over six weeks of research between March and May, with 1,392 data points, here’s what we found:
From a vertical market perspective, workplace projects are on hold, with lots of discussions about rightsizing i n the wake of COVID-19 (especially in the tech sector). Yet across other verticals, we see a mixed bag of growth and pause, with a continuation of undertakings already in progress and a stoppage of ones in the planning phase. Many initiatives in the retail, oil, airline, consulting, hospitality (restaurants), creative, nonurgent health care, multi-family, and financial sectors are on hold, while residential, civil, government, and education projects are generally moving forward. Emergency health-care projects are ramping up at this time.
We’ve been sharing insights on a regular basis with the participants in our surveys, and the feedback on this type of data was tremendous. However, our respondents asked for more detail, so we segmented the research by audience, geography, and company and market size.
We’ve summarized the highlights below, but for graphical representation of the data and more specific metrics you can join the impact survey and get the results delivered to you.
Audience
Overall, we know that projects at the manufacturer level typically lag behind A&D firm activity. For example, throughout this study, the proportion of manufacturers saying that bid activity has stopped completely has never exceeded 4 percent. Meanwhile, this proportion has never gone below 20 percent for A&D firms.
The first week of measurement did not show drastic cancellation of projects, but the percentage of projects canceled gradually crept up until week 5 in the study and reflected some optimism in week 6. However, the amount of bid activity that was stopped or nearly stopped increased week by week, as did the measure of bids “continuing as usual.”
BID ACTIVITY: The picture isn’t promising on this front, with an increasing number of respondents reporting that bid activity has stopped or nearly stopped.
Company Size
Overall, the immediate impact has been most profound on small businesses in the design industry.
Companies with 50 or fewer employees reacted faster (or were hit harder) than large companies when it came to pay cuts and furloughs. They were also more likely to have projects put on hold in the early days of measuring and were significantly less likely to have rated bid activity as “average.” Lastly, these companies with 50 or fewer employees were also significantly more likely to say that bid activity had stopped entirely.
EMPLOYMENT AT A&D FIRMS: Most firms seem to have slowed down on furloughs or layoffs, with smaller practices starting to leverage government assistance.