To-The-Trade Episode Summary
Most people in the home furnishings industry will tell you they’re designer-friendly. Jenny Heinzen York can tell you what it actually costs to be.
Jenny is VP of Marketing at Currey & Company, a second-generation family-owned brand approaching its 40th anniversary. Robert and Suzy Curry founded the company as a garden furniture brand. Their son Brownlee now leads it, and that family ownership structure comes up again and again throughout this conversation, because it explains almost every business decision Currey makes. In an industry moving steadily toward private equity, being family-owned means they can control their destiny, take creative risks, hold real inventory, and say no to the safe play when it conflicts with who they are.
Jenny came to Currey in 2019 after 20 years in editorial, including a long run at Home Accents, plus a stretch at America’s Mart with a specific charge to grow their design business. She watched the industry shift firsthand, including the rise of designers as a distribution channel, the consolidation of trade shows, and which companies made the transition to serving designers well and which stumbled. When she joined Currey, Brownlee told her to spend six months just learning before she tried to change anything. In hindsight, she credits that advice. Understanding the warehouse, customer service, finance, and design teams from the inside made everything she eventually did on the outside sharper.
Then COVID arrived and stripped away what Currey did best: showing up in person. What was left was marketing, and Jenny leaned in hard. The relationships already built over the years gave Currey a foundation that carried them through. They came out growing, and they haven’t slowed down since.
One moment in the conversation stands out. Laurie mentions she has never heard a sales executive say what Jenny said before: that Currey genuinely wants the small orders. For many brands, the designer who specifies one fixture per year is a nuisance to manage. For Currey, those designers make up a very long tail of the business, and it is a tail they have no interest in cutting. The logic is simple. If a piece is right for a designer’s project once a year, why would you pass on that? It is a different way of thinking about the designer-friendly brand question, one that goes beyond policy and into actual culture.
Being genuinely designer-friendly, Jenny explains, is not a label you put on the showroom door. It means restructuring your warehouse and customer service to handle smaller, more complicated orders. It means training a sales team to call on hundreds of tiny accounts alongside the big ones without treating the small ones as less valuable. It means being willing to let go of people on your team who won’t make that cultural shift. Laurie points out that she has stopped meeting with brands and says flatly, “You don’t actually like designers.” That has to change first.
Designers who want to stand out to a brand like Currey should come to market when they can. The in-person experience is completely different from any website. But the tip that carries the most practical weight is free. Vet your brand partners carefully, and then treat the good ones like partners in return. That means photographing your finished project, owning the copyright to those images, and sharing them directly with the manufacturers whose pieces are in the room. Currey works with thousands of products across lighting, furniture, and now bath vanities. They cannot shoot everything. When a designer sends installation images and says, Use these however you want, that is a genuine contribution to the brand’s ability to do its work, and it tends to build the kind of relationship that holds up when something goes wrong.
Laurie traces this back to a habit she’s seen in one designer in particular: taking her own photos at the same time as the professional shoot, retaining copyright, and passing images directly to reps and manufacturers as a professional thank-you. It doesn’t cost anything, and it has paid back for her career in ways that are hard to quantify but easy to feel.
On the industry at large: Jenny sees the shift toward quality as real. Consumers are tired of fast furniture that looks good online and falls apart in a year. She’s watching the trade show landscape continue to consolidate, which means every face-to-face interaction matters more than it used to. She and Laurie have both been working on building better systems for how brands can support designers at the grassroots level, including showrooms that provide designers with more business education and greater transparency around process, pricing, and product.
On AI: Jenny describes herself as a Luddite. The journalist in her won’t hand over Currey’s voice to a machine. For analytics and sales projections, yes. For creative and communications, no. She’s also resistant to CGI, though the volume of imagery demands is starting to push back. The line she draws is consistent: it has to look like something Currey would actually make. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t go out.
As a family-owned company, Currey designs what they want to design. They run their manufacturing mostly through a factory in the Philippines, which they largely own, allowing them to produce limited quantities, hold inventory, and actually service orders rather than build to demand. They accept that not everything hits. Playing it safe would cost them the edge that makes designers want to specify Currey in the first place.
For what’s ahead: the cordless lighting collection has been a strong addition over the past 18 months, bath vanities are now part of the lineup, and a new product category is coming in the fall. Currey will be in Atlanta, Dallas, and Las Vegas this summer and back in High Point in the fall.
If you caught Jenny earlier this year, she also joined Laurie for To-The-Trade Live at KBIS 2026 with Nikki Levy, where they dug into brand-designer partnerships from both sides of the table.
Timestamp Guide
00:52 – Currey & Company history and family ownership
02:53 – Jenny’s editorial background; how she came to know Currey
04:01 – The “no designers allowed” era and what it was really about
05:21 – Currey as an early adopter of the designer trade channel
09:04 – Why serving designers requires a different sales force and culture
11:47 – Small orders as the long tail of Currey’s core business
13:54 – Jenny’s 30-year career path from Furniture Today to Currey
17:02 – Joining in 2019; Brownlee’s advice; the COVID pivot
27:43 – Family ownership and creative risk-taking
31:52 – What makes a designer memorable to a brand
32:53 – Why sharing installation photography matters more than designers think
38:56 – Biggest industry shifts: COVID, quality, trade show consolidation
41:45 – Jenny on AI: resistant on creative, open on analytics
44:09 – What’s next for Currey