Tender Heart Treasures creates 90 percent of its own products—and considers this one of its competitive advantages.

By Alicia Orr Suman

“We have to stay in line with the decorating trends, because that affects the type of home accessories that consumers will want,” Watanabe-Gerdes notes. And, you can bet that a year or so later those trends will appear in home decorating, not only impacting Tender Heart Treasures’ lines, but those of catalogers such as Pottery Barn and Crate & Barrel. “You’ll even see similarities in apparel trends,” she says.