Let’s spare ourselves the lengthy trip down memory lane—the stomach-churning headlines, the cloth masks, the bleach-sprayed groceries. It started five years ago, to the month. We were all there, and we all remember what those early days of Covid were like.

Those of us in the industry also have a set of—let’s face it—complicated associations with the pandemic. While the world was falling apart, the world was buying furniture. Covid was a boom time, unleashing a fountain of opportunity for designers, retailers, manufacturers, and anyone else who could even tangentially claim to be in the business of home.

That boom is over. Some analysts predicted we’d forever be wearing masks and bumping elbows—that’s over too. Save for scuffed-up social distancing stickers clinging stubbornly to linoleum floors, there’s not a ton of physical evidence that we recently went through a global pandemic.

But we’re all still operating in a world that has been shaped by Covid. And five years later, it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on all the ways the pandemic did (and didn’t) leave a lasting impact on the design industry.

VIRTUAL REALITY
With in-person gatherings canceled and in-person shopping cut back, the industry was flooded with a wave of virtual everything—online replacements for activities once conducted IRL. That started with rudimentary product presentations done ad hoc over Zoom, but soon evolved into a more baroque form. The first virtual showhouse arrived in 2020—with many more to follow—alongside virtual showrooms, virtual events and even virtual conferences.

Many of these innovations have quietly faded away. The most recent virtual showhouses were held in 2023. Making a digital clone of one’s showroom hasn’t gone away exactly, but the solution didn’t become de rigueur for brands the same way having an Instagram account did. Virtual events haven’t disappeared either, but they’re often one-off seminars or extensions of real-world meetups. Gone are the multiday all-online conferences of 2021.

But the Covid era’s forced pivot to virtual did make a lasting impact. For one, it sparked startups like The Expert and Intro, which allowed designers to easily connect with clients for online consultations. Both have outlasted the pandemic, but even designers who aren’t on these platforms are embracing the model: quick, simple FaceTime or Zoom consultations for clients on a budget. It’s the version of e-design that seems to have staying power.

“Covid was definitely a catalyst, but the need it addressed was always there,” says Leo Seigal, co-founder of The Expert. “The pandemic just accelerated a shift that was already underway: Designers and clients were looking for more efficient, flexible ways to connect. … It’s less about Covid now, and more about how the industry has evolved to meet modern client expectations.”

Design businesses have changed as well. All-remote work never permanently took over the big firms—most returned to the office long ago. But a hybrid approach has allowed many to offer employees (and bosses) a greater degree of flexibility. And for smaller operators, there are new options. During Covid, a flood of companies offering remote back-end services for designers—rendering, purchasing, accounting, you name it—rose to prominence.

“We saw tremendous growth during Covid,” says Danae Branson, the founder of Elite Design Assistants, a company that provides a variety of remote services to the trade. For early-career designers—or those who just want to run a tight ship—it’s become easy to farm out pieces of the business to fractional employees who may live hundreds of miles away. “Our clients started requesting more services from us [and] we were able to start offering them almost everything that could be done virtually.”

VENDOR PROBLEMS
If you ask anyone in design what it was like to work during the pandemic, you will get one of two answers: “It was amazing,” or “It was awful.” Both are accurate. While Covid was a time of unparalleled growth and opportunity, it put an unholy strain on the mechanics of the industry. Designers who normally took on five projects at a time had 20. Manufacturers who typically took on 50 orders a month had 500. That glut worked itself all the way back up the supply chain, which, combined with lockdowns, quarantines and an overworked logistics network, remained a hopeless tangle.

The result was a lot of crazy lead times, missed deadlines, and missing shipments and product. Relationships between designers and their vendors became frayed—a tension that has lasted past the pandemic.

“The vendor-designer relationship is at a vulnerable state post-Covid,” says Beth Bender, principal and co-founder of design services company The Dove Agency. “Where we are seeing [that relationship] succeeding is around service and procurement support. Designers can convince a client to purchase through them with their preferred vendor by sharing the ease of the purchase—that the items will be received timely and in good condition with a quality guarantee against damages. Vendors that do not follow through on those conditions are extremely vulnerable.”

There are a few positives that can be spun out of the supply chain breakdown. One is simply that designers are better than ever at rolling with the instability of a complex project. “Managing client expectations” is now on everyone’s résumé. Vendors, too, are better at grappling with uncertainty, and the companies that delivered for designers through the chaos enjoy greater trust than ever.

The other bonus is that, after getting battered for the better part of four years, the supply chain really has gotten better. Partially as a response to the 2018 tariffs, partially as a reaction to the disruptions of the pandemic, home goods production is far less concentrated in China now, making bottlenecks and delays less likely. Logistics companies know how to work through a crisis, and lead times have shrunk again.

“[The supply chain] is nimbler than it’s ever been,” says Suren Gopalakrishnan, a co-founder of the supply chain and logistics management company MakersPalm. “To survive [the] market unpredictability, you need to be nimble or else there’s no chance to grow into a profitable business.”

TRADE SHOW SHAKE-UP
During the height of the pandemic, there was a lot of hand-wringing among the industry’s big event organizers that Covid would kill their business. Showhouses and markets can be career-changing events, but designers don’t need to go—and after a one- or two-year hiatus, would they come back?

There were casualties—the AD Design Show didn’t make it—but for the most part, the marquee U.S. shows have all more or less reclaimed their audience and their relevance. However, across the Atlantic, the story is slightly different. German fair IMM Cologne was forced to cancel its January 2025 edition in the face of declining attendance and an exodus of large brands. Meanwhile in Italy, Milan Design Week is as popular as ever, but the central fair, Salone del Mobile, has lost some high-profile exhibitors that are now favoring activations at their showrooms in the city proper.

These movements in Europe may be temporary—trends in exhibition strategy at shows like Milan change all the time, and IMM Cologne has already announced a redesigned 2026 edition—but they speak to a shift that’s true stateside as well. Starved of human contact for a few years, brands and designers have emerged from the pandemic with a deeper desire for more personal connections with one another. At events like Paris Déco Off and NYCxDesign, brands have increasingly favored intimate, invitation-only events over blowout parties. A similar drive for one-on-one relationships has fueled the rise of pop-up events like Design Social, Design Edge and The Ticking Tent—all smaller, curated gatherings focused on brand discovery.

A NEW GEOGRAPHY
Design follows money. And during the pandemic, money headed south. As Americans left dense urban centers like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles during Covid, they largely headed to places like Florida, Texas and the Carolinas. You can see that pattern in everything from census data to real estate listings to tax records—in 2023, New York collected 20 percent less than the year before while Texas collected 10 percent more.

You can also see it in the home industry, as brands have doubled down on their investment in the Sunbelt. There’s a reason why Jamestown is developing a new design district in Charleston, not Chicago; why Schumacher tested out its retail-showroom hybrid in Nashville, not Jersey City; and why Perigold’s first store will be in Houston, not Boston. L.A. and New York will always be huge markets, but the pandemic has created new power centers in the design industry.

EVOLVING PERCEPTIONS OF HOME
Finally, an open question: Will the Covid boom have a lasting effect on the way we all feel about home? During the pandemic, there was speculation floating around that Americans, forced to finally spend serious time in their houses, would come to appreciate them more deeply than before. Some talked about the 2020s as “the decade of home,” a time in which the domestic sphere enjoyed greater cultural influence and—ideally—designers made greater profits.

There, the jury is out. Despite “revenge travel” and the surge in overbooked restaurants, we are still spending more time at home (in 2023 it was an hour and a half more, on average, than 2019). But whether we value it more is harder to say. At the moment, a host of factors—ranging from the frozen housing market to the simple fact that most pandemic purchases simply haven’t worn out yet—are putting a damper on the industry’s fortunes. When market conditions improve and all those panic-bought sofas get threadbare, we’ll find out whether Americans’ Covid-era obsession with home is a new paradigm or a pandemic relic.