Home and lifestyle 🏠

‍Home and lifestyle refers to the habits of a certain population, what their routines are, what they usually purchase and how they behave regarding their lifestyle choices. The sector is pretty dependant on the region you’re focusing on. A deep understanding of the motivation behind a population’s choices can however help you push your product to market and make it flourish.

Home and Lifestyle also encompasses the everyday items present in your living environment, this could be anything from a chair, to a smartphone, to a scale.

To understand more thoroughly what home and lifestyle is all about, let’s dive into the emerging trends of the sector.

• Modern and vintage looks

Be it wooden ornaments or small decorations on dining tables, people often go for a modern comfort with vintage looks, meaning they prefer comfort rather than abstract geometrical shapes. This lifestyle goes for the fashion world as many out of style came back from the dead. Interiors have followed that trend with the use of glass materials and

The main idea behind this trend is the careful combination of modern features with older, worn out looks. While this is particularly true for the design/architecture/style domain, it’s applicable to other fields with the same idea in mind, ease of use and a classic, timeless design.

• Healthy living

This one has been pretty important lately, with multiple lockdowns occuring around the world, a lot of people decided to focus on their health. That means eating better, working out, taking care of the products you eat and knowing what you apply on your body. Organic and healthy foods surpassed junk food, and crowds on jogging paths increased too. More and more people started talking about mental health and all around wellness.

This means anything related to your body and its well being is going to find its place in the sector as consumers grow more and more wary of their mind and body.

• People becoming more homely

Largely due to the pandemic, staying at home and making that place comfortable  has become largely accepted and encouraged. At the beginning, people wanted to go out, walk outside, enjoy the  outdoors, at the end people started learning new things at home and working from home.

Companies joined this trend by encouraging working from home, people got more and more accustomed to working not on a desk but on a couch, with a blanket on their feet. For businesses this means encouraging home deliveries, bettering their online presence and making their products indispensable on a day to day basis.

• Minimalism

Having to stay at home made a lot of people focus on the essential and realize that they didn’t need much, having. Pay cuts have pushed a part of the population to reevaluate their needs and center accordingly. Spending habits are changing, setting the spotlight on the things that add value to people’s lives rather than random objects that sit on shelves for months or years.

As the famous motto goes “Less is more”. It’s important to make your product extremely desirable rather than encouraging sales by dropping the price or putting it on sale.

• People are moving online

Particularly during the pandemic, as people basically lived online, we saw the rise of zoom, as a video chat service, but also the consolidation of several streaming services. This trend will surely not die down as people are still working from home.

As a business, this means you can benefit from offering your services online, think of software as a service, streaming and online stores.

• Eco friendly behaviors

This pandemic shed light on the impact of the human race on the planet. We saw rivers clearing up, and the drastic reduction of air pollution.

This trend puts an emphasis on reusables and on eco friendly materials. Brands can benefit from it by adapting their processes, setting goals for emission cuts, privileging greener products or finding plant based alternatives.

Why is the industry looking at technology to boost their business?

Understanding these trends is incredibly important as a business, this will allow you to reassess and adapt your strategy to the market you're dealing with. As a tech business, you can benefit from focusing on any of the previous trends in Home and Lifestyle. More particularly

• Online presence
• Online services
• Ecology
• Minimalism and vintage looks
• Staying healthy

Tech will of course be central to moving your business online, (if not already) and making sure your business stays on the front page of the different search engines. As more and more people use the internet, and during the pandemic, online security, for users but most importantly for businesses has become a growing concern. Ensuring the security of your business is a major concern.

Technology will also help record and optimize your consumption. A major focus for electrical businesses like Schneider and Legrand is the creation of smart electric boards that minimize electric waste. In that sense, tech can also be built to connect entire houses to form an Internet of Things, housing being the first major domain for a connected ecosystem.

While tech focuses much more on the internals of a device than its design, as we previously saw, the outer layer is also important, take note as we’ve mentioned the major trends of minimalism and vintage styles. Tech companies can benefit from following these lines and appealing to consumers.

The health industry is growing closer and closer to tech with the rise of personal wearables, connected scales and smartwatches. Any tech that tracks or gives advice on individual consumption is a promising tech for the following years.