While the rest of the design community took a break to ring in the new year, one industry membership organization quietly acquired another. This week, The Leaders of Design officially announced its purchase of the Decorative Furnishings Association. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The change in ownership marks a new chapter for the DFA. Established in 1934, the group had counted top brands, showrooms and trade vendors among its members for nearly a century before falling dormant in the years that followed the pandemic. Leaders of Design co-founder Keith Granet hopes to revitalize the DFA with a new membership model, revamped programming and access to previously untapped industry insights.
The first part of the strategy involves adjusting the business model of the DFA. While the organization will remain a nonprofit, its new owners also plan to introduce membership fees—likely a tiered system based on the size of a member’s operation—to fund both programming and events. They have also created a new executive director role, which will be filled by Rachel York, who comes with a background in both fashion and design and will work in tandem with the DFA’s existing board of directors and its president, Meredith Xavier.
“Right now [it’s] about revitalizing the organization by gaining new members and showing the value that the organization could bring to the industry,” says Granet.
He also plans to connect the DFA to another of his ventures, Studio Designer, the software platform he relaunched 10 years ago. While membership to The Leaders of Design will remain separate, Granet points out plenty of opportunities for cross-pollination between the two organizations—for example, among Leaders of Design designers (the group counts 100 members) who also run retail storefronts or e-commerce operations.
“It closes the ecosystem, so that we’re fully connected [throughout] the full transactional cycle, which is from designers selecting product to the manufacturers they buy from,” says Granet. “It gives an opportunity for DFA members to become sponsors of Leaders of Design if they choose to, and it allows for designer members to be more engaged with the DFA if they are so inclined.”
Meanwhile, Granet plans to provide DFA members with the advantage of data gleaned from Studio Designer, a platform that he says logs some $5 billion in transactions annually. While he doesn’t plan to give members access to designer-specific data, the idea is to share aggregated findings, such as how often a brand’s product is proposed to a client compared with how frequently it is purchased, or where a vendor ranks among its competitors.
Elsewhere, the DFA’s new owners have set their sights on reigniting community engagement. Part of that plan will involve surveying members on current industry-specific topics, then building workshops and webinars based around the resulting feedback. Additionally, the group plans to partner with educational programs to develop scholarships and grants relevant to the design industry.
All together, it’s a similar playbook to the one Granet has followed with The Leaders of Design. “We realized that not only have we built a community that relies heavily on each other, but we’ve given them leadership training and tried to be there for everybody’s needs—whether it was during the pandemic and they were just trying to survive, or with changes [from] social media to AI to anything relating to the business of design,” he says. In the process, he adds, “we’ve recognized the importance of sharing vital information with each other to help grow each other’s businesses, [and it] translates exactly to the DFA’s community. It’s that old expression, ‘All boats rise with a rising tide.’”
