Why Design Fees Should Pay for Themselves.
When you look at the marketplace, either at a humble grocery or a fancy car dealership, do you look at it from the perspective of a consumer or seller?
MAKE YOUR INTERIOR DESIGNER EARN THEIR PROFITS!
Service, not sales. We aren’t all Scrooge McDuck!
It’s a natural human behavior to think about ways to save: zoom out and observe the Greatest Generation, scrimping and saving, sitting with the lights out like my dear Aunt Minnie, even when she had saved a small fortune and could leave the lights on for years without penalty. I remember one of my favorite people, the dear-hearted Christine ‘Mama’ Knopp, scraping out the pots of each morsel or food to be served as bounty to her many guests in her Appalachian home. Gen Y complains that the Boomers are holding onto their wealth and are not sharing it; that, while Gen Y struggles to pay off student loans or buy a first home, the Boomers glide around in their swanky cars. Perhaps it’s easy to shift back and forth between attitudes of wealth, plenty, poverty or scarcity, but perhaps that’s an exercise in futility?
Because we all hate feeling like a CHUMP, no?! I remember my first job: I offered my babysitting services around the neighborhood for a whopping $1 dollar per hour, then came home completely wiped after watching about fifteen screaming toddlers during a cocktail party. I was livid that I’d lowered myself to such a wage a decent, valued service. I still hadn’t learned my lesson when, upon arriving in Chicago in 2012, I accepted a job that paid me only $13/hour, even though I had my MFA and was the only head in the office who knew Revit architecture. “[The boss] will keep squeezing you if you keep acting like her maid,” said my co-worker. And she was right! My boss, a lovely person who’d had to downsize after the recession and lay off many people from her firm, was not ready to value my services because she got so much more than she paid for. And it finally made sense: in capitalism, no one ever gets paid what they’re worth.
Businesses boom and bust and go round and round for a bottom line, using people as a means to the boring, bottomless end, chasing profits - and for what purpose? More is more only in spirit; the opposite of more is ENOUGH. So I refuse to participate in the exploitation of anyone for my personal gain. I will not mark up the work of others so that my profits are wider; I believe that if my upholstery workroom charges me X amount, I will charge my client X amount. Simple. Some designers do not believe in that and end up making quite a profit, which I can’t argue with, per se, since I don’t have the enormous overhead that requires such funneling.
I tender a valuable service to my clients for a price and I don’t mark up any merchandise. This broadens their budgets to pay for the things they can see, touch, and feel: items that will glow, sparkle with beauty, and enrich their lives. It is a wonderful thing to have items in your home that help you organize your existence the way furnishings do, and I love the value it brings. It enhances my clients’ daily lives in ways that are not just ornamental, but instrumental, and that is the value of the fees I charge. There’s also value, obviously, in saving money on items for which they’d pay double the price.
So let’s say a prospective client comes to me and says, “I have a budget of $1M.” In my mind, I don’t start dancing and having dollar signs in my eyes and salivating and doing a jig: I think, That’s terrific. I can stretch out this project until next year, take the project slowly and surely, and offer them items that are higher-priced as well as a mixture of lower-end items. It’s the same for clients with lower budgets: my clients can trust that I’m offering them the furniture, fixtures, and equipment I suggest because I think they are a good fit for the form and function of their home, not because it is going to yield a higher profit margin.
That’s MY BOTTOM line. What’s yours?