Tariffs were the biggest, most dramatic news story in the design world this year, but one could argue they were less impactful than they might have been. The economy never crashed, prices rose but didn’t skyrocket, and most businesses kept rolling along, albeit with a lot of caution. The effect so far has been less a catastrophe, more a kind of general confusion. “I think companies and businesses have spent the whole year playing defense trying to figure it out,” says retail columnist Warren Shoulberg on the latest episode of The Business of Home Podcast. “It’s a lost year.”

Lost year or no, a lot happened in 2025. This week on the podcast, Shoulberg joins host Dennis Scully, BOH editor in chief Kaitlin Petersen and executive editor Fred Nicolaus for a look back on the last 12 months—and what’s to come in the new year.

The discussion included plenty of thoughts on tariffs, especially what might come next as the Supreme Court is set to weigh in on the president’s trade policy. Shoulberg expressed skepticism that anything the court decided would matter, and that the administration would come up with new ways to tax imports: “[It’s] what Alfred Hitchcock used to call a MacGuffin, which is [a] meaningless distraction.”

Petersen chimed in to say that even if the court rules the tariffs illegal, the ensuing chaos would have its own challenges. “Can you imagine everyone trying to administer refunds on the designer side?” she pointed out. “Do you go out to your client every single time you charged them [for] a tariff and give them their money back, because you got it back? ... Would the industry cheer if suddenly we don’t have some of these tariffs anymore? Maybe. Would we then have to figure out how to undo all the work we spent this year doing? Yes.”

Elsewhere, the team discusses how 2025’s K-shaped economy—affluent Americans more well-off than ever, lower earners struggling to make ends meet—might change the shape of the design industry. “Over the past 20 years, low interest rates, housing movement and HGTV have created this mass affluent clientele, and there’s a lot of designers who have specialized in that and built their businesses around it,” says Nicolaus. “In the current market, those clients aren’t doing quite as well. … It’s possible that, if these conditions hold, we’ll see the orientation of the industry change a little bit.”

The panel debated a range of other subjects that might also affect the course of the industry, from AI to a design center shakeup to a stagnant housing market. Most of the important issues of 2025 were complex and potentially treacherous. But as Scully points out, this was also a year to celebrate resilience. “Despite everything that has been thrown at this industry and so many of the people who lead it,” he said, “[they] seem somehow remarkably unbowed.”

This episode is sponsored by Loloi and John Rosselli & Associates. Listen to the show below. If you like what you hear, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

The Thursday Show

Host Dennis Scully and BOH executive editor Fred Nicolaus discuss the biggest news in the design world, including the death of house flipping, RH’s latest earnings report and a new online scam targeting designers.

This episode is sponsored by Joon Loloi and Programa. Listen to the show below. If you like what you hear, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.