Design 101: The Hidden Costs of Free Design

More and more big brands like Kohler, Williams-Sonoma, IKEA and Restoration Hardware have begun to believe that it is a good business idea to offer their customers with free interior design services. In fact, one retailer answers the telephone in-store by first offering their callers free interior design services. This is not necessarily a new way of doing business for the furniture retail industry, but whether you’re an emerging designer or consumer it is important to be aware of the pitfalls of free design.

At Articulated, we are an big advocate of providing the right type of design service that falls within the scope of the project. Scope often includes the available timeline, stipulated budget, complexity of work and design style. For our team, this is an extensive process that begins with a complementary 30 minute Discovery Call and then we navigate the best kind of design work delivery option for our client’s needs. Having said that, we are not unfamiliar with seemingly out-pricing ourselves and respect that professional design services can not be afforded by everyone, so we offer online design work options to reduce hourly billing with a flat design fee. We have been in business for over 10 years and bring over 20 years of industry experience to every project we do design work together on and we truly believe that this has tremendous value.

Yet, retailers constantly want to grab more of the market share and there is only so much pie to go around. This is called a competitive threat, but when it comes down to brass tacks, there differentiators are so vast that there’s no way to make ground between what Articulated does and what retailer’s free design services provide.

The pitfalls

1. Professional insurance

The most important question to ask when engaging with a retailer’s free design services is to determine if the salesperson is qualified and if they offer the customer protection against their errors or omissions. The real answer to that question is that no, they do not. We recommend asking a salesperson for a copy of their errors & omissions insurance and if they can explain their coverage. Customer’s have no protection against in-store advice that a salesperson at a retailer offers because the retail business does not ensure that their employees adhere to professional standards of conduct or provide the basic liability insurances to the employees. Many retailers will place limitations on the employee of what they can and can not do, such as not permitted to leave the store to work with a customer, but many of them rely on the salesperson to adhere to their rules without any quality assurance.

2. Sales targets

The perils and consequences of free interior design services are often under the guise of added-value service but in all actuality they are not in the customers best interest. Retailers are after one thing: higher merchandise sales volume. They reward high sales performance (not teamwork, accountability, ownership, or creativity) with commissions. It’s true that profit is a goal for every business, even ours, but the difference between a retailer selling merchandise and a professional designer doing the same is that the independent designer is seeking a solution to your problem with hundreds of suppliers or vendors.

3. It’s decorating

The risk of utilizing free design services puts the consumer at the perception of some type of advantage. It seems an easy choice to use free services, and it may be, but what is actually being designed? Decorating is an important part of what an interior designer does, but it is only a small fraction of what they do. Much like a draftsperson calling themselves an Architect, labeling these free services as “interior design” is false advertising. There is an old phrase in the industry: “Interior designers may decorate, but decorators can not design.” Decorators require no education, but my certifications required 7 years of full-time interior design work and a bachelors degree-level of education plus ongoing professional development every year in safety, health, wellness, and business.

4. Price fluctuations

Considering large brands are juggernauts and marketing machines with massive spending budgets, the independent small business owners that amass the vast majority of interior design businesses are constantly battling these gorilla free enterprise offerings where nothing is truly ever free. They target the consumer with sale merchandise, and that is the hook. Everyone loves a sale, but truth be told, no 25% off sale at any retailer is actually a sale when their markups are 300-500% above cost. That 25% discount is a small drop in their bucket when the retailer has the freedom to create the illusion of a sale by simply jacking up the regular retail price so they can continue to make their high-margin sale. Merchandise is often secretly re-ticketed at higher prices while no one is looking or the wiser for it. I’m on the verge of calling this pricing strategy a racket.

5. Disposable advice

The disposable culture is rightfully getting a bad rap because it’s costly to our environment, land fills, carbon footprint, and labour markets. Furnishings and decorative accessories are a major contributor to waste, just look down the back alleys in any major city with rental markets. Disposable design is wrong. If we applied what our grandparents learned by way of investing in key pieces and keeping them, it would be more money in our pockets at the end of the day. Large retailers do not understand what their controllable environmental contribution is. One retailer is leaving the way with their buy-back program and that’s IKEA. Good work on this one, Team Ingvar Kamprad from Elmtaryd near Agunnaryd.

Written by Corey Klassen CMKBD NCIDQ IIDA