The Comfort Economy : How Nesting Is Innovating The User Experience.

We all want to relax and spend more time at home. It’s the natural place to be as our society shifts towards a better work-life balance. The comfort of the home serves as the most powerful antidote to the state of the world: the political noise surrounding us and the seemingly insurmountable pressures of hyper-digital and urban living. Staying in is the chill pill we all need. The home is also our charging station in between activities and experiences we are passionate about.

Technology and the on-demand economy have fueled the allure of staying at home. We can pretty much order anything we want from our couch or bed: from entertainment on Netflix or Apple TV, to exotic new recipes through Blue Apron, to everything else from Amazon, with the latter pretty much single-handedly revolutionizing how people shop. On-demand, home shopping has also reimagined how we discover things, giving consumers a platform to leisurely try new products, as the popularity of subscription services such as StitchFix and Birchbox demonstrate.

Staying in is Big Business and is serving up great incentives for innovation. Here are some of the ways:

The Beauty of The Smart Home. Platforms such as Google’s Nest and Amazon’s Alexa are making managing household chores and key functions simpler and more fun. They are also ushering a next-generation experience that will be intuitive, fun and more personalized at all levels. Think of refrigerators that inform you of what needs to be replenished and creative personalization through smart surfaces. Think also of more friendly, cuter, and smarter robots that help automate tedious functions. The house of the present-future is a blend of friendly comfort-driven functionalities and the ultimate expression of individual lifestyle and cultural interests.

Home as Entertainment Centrals. Technology is also ushering a new level of rich-media experiences for the home. Besides access to boundless entertainment options, the delivery of the experience is bound to get more inspiring. Think of smart television sets bringing forth a lot of the interactivity we enjoy from the online world, or augmented reality stations allowing us to immerse in exotic travels or fictional games. Facebook, for instance, is rumored to soon be launching its SmartTV app. As the focus on experiences rises, the kitchen’s role will also be amplified. Imagine fueling greater discovery potential to kitchen with entertainment centers that inspire you around unique dishes and ingredients, that can than be easily purchased.

With a greater focus on wellness, think also of how the workout experience will be redefined with a new home gym and experiences like Peloton which allow you to work out in the comfort of your own home while tapping into the best of a community, with access to a trainer, playlists and other enthusiasts like you, all in your own terms. Augmented reality simulators will also drive further interest in spots, allowing us to learn, fail and have fun, all in the comfort of our own privacy.

The New Work Environment. The home is also increasingly becoming the place where we work. Companies are tapping into telecommuting as both means of cutting costs and providing employees with a better work-life balance. This shift has brought a relaxed, creative energy to the entire work environment. This has impacted the wave of comfort and familiarity impacting visual work settings, from offices that are more relaxed (think open floor plans, enticing kitchen and dining areas, and play rooms) as well as a dress code that prices relaxed innovation. Comfy home type-settings are also the primary reference point for entrepreneurs and start-ups, with experiences ranging from start-up offices in home garages to shared work-spaces, with successful business models such as weworks tapping into the power of this movement.

Comfort as Fashion Statement. No recent development has invigorated the fashion industry as much as the push towards comfort. Athleisure: stylish fashion inspired by active sports but worn primarily outside of the gym, is the powerful response to fashion’s traditional comfort issues. Consumers now want to carry over the same relaxed vibe they’re experiencing at home to their pieces of apparel. Brands like Lululemon, Bonobos and active brands such as Nike and Adidas have moved in to deliver this need. Even luxury brands like Gucci are serving up straight-from-your bedroom inspirations such as their wildly successful fur-trimmed loafers. This comfort style movement will continue strongly with greater tech-infused advancement in terms of light, weather adaptive-fabrics. Comfort truly is the new black.

At home everywhere. The most powerful creative and business implication around our desire for home comfort will be its experiential impact in other industries. We will want to feel at home everywhere. In the retail environment we are seeing the rise of more loungy, comfortably inviting retail spaces such as the Row’s NYC townhouse inspired, places where you go to spend time and get a full sense of the brand’s lifestyle perspective. We believe that the culinary world will continue its attraction with home-style environments and dishes, served up in warm and comfortable settings, yet always with some form of novelty.

New forms of travel will also continue to deliver this more personal experience, as evidenced by the success of AIRBNB, as travelers want to see the world but feel at home. We are also seeing new opportunities for the real-estate development space as consumers crave new living environments that are designed around passion points. Think of living on a golf course, or if you’re an alpha-shopper in a new retail-centered complex.

As the home continues to influence a more creative economy that taps into the power of comfort and creativity, we should also explore more ways in which the home can boost our creative and innovative juices. Think of creative work or problem solving that you can best tackle at home, away from the day-to-day minutiae at work. Think also about all the great content you can consume and create from the creative refuge that is your home.

And from a brand perspective, think of a simply powerful question: how would you make a consumer feel more at home across the entire brand journey? This is already a great beginning to the greatest issue impacting consumer-brand relations: lackluster customer service. So here’s to kicking back at home!