Modern technology: love it or hate it.

How dependent we have become in recent years on new technologies; mobile phones, the internet, satnav and on and on ad nausium.

And, how infuriating it is when these technologies fail to do what we expect them to do. in the past few weeks, I have experienced a failure of my mobile phone, on which I keep my diary and my satnav. Having scraped by without them for three weeks, I have got my phone back; with the storage completely wiped. Syncing to my PC with ActiveSync restored all my contact and my diary but reinstalling CoPilot, given that telephone support is withdrawn six weeks after you buy it means that if you need help you have to do it by email, which makes the send and response process painfully slow and is ‘doing my brain in’.

Enough of my personal frustrations, let’s have a look at effect of technology on bespoke furniture production. As with all these technologies, the benefits do eventually outshine the downsides, although when they do fail you they still drive you crazy.

Naturally, designing fitted furniture for clients involves appointments to visit their homes, for which my Outlook diary and satnav are irreplaceable. But when the technology really kicks in is after we have taken an order. The first part of the process is converting the designer’s notes and sketches into a working drawing that’s initial purpose is to help manage the essential process of iteration to ensure that our customer understands what we are going to produce and, vitally, that we understand our client’s expectations.  This process used to be conducted on a drawing board using drawing (or tracing) paper, a ruler , protractor and Rotring drawing pen. Edits were made by scratching  out ink with a razor blade and redrawing.  The end result often got very scruffy. The final draft would then be photocopied and sometimes tidied up with Tippex and pens.

Today we have Autocad and derivative drafting software that reduces the drawing board time significantly and, more importantly, facilitates unlimited edits with no loss of quality. Also, you can’t cheat a digital drawing, dimensions are exact to a millimetre and will not allow the furniture to be too big for the space into which it is to be fitted (can happen).

After the client has carried out their first audit of the working drawings, we send a surveyor to check the measurements and any tricky angles or shapes. The surveyor will then carry out another audit with the client, reinforce all the choices of finish, colour, handles etcetera and explain the more esoteric details of the drawings. At this point we pick up any detail changes and the surveyor revises the drawings in the same software and resubmits them for our customers approval.

Then in a spreadsheet workbook containing about 5,000 product codes permutated across dozens of door styles or ranges in scores of finishes and millions of individual unit prices to check our pricing and establish whether the drawing revisions affect the total price so that any changes can be agreed with the customer.

The final detailed drawings are then interpreted by the factory production scheduler and the dimensions and specification of each individual piece of bespoke furniture are then fed into another software programme that deconstructs every cabinet, wardrobe, chest of doors etcetera into its component parts and prints out schedules for purchasing the raw materials specifically required to manufacture and install the order. It also produces cutting lists for preparing the materials for production.

Before such technological advances, all of this work of drawing the finished furniture installation, ordering and cutting the raw materials was was done with pencil paper and a calculator.  The opportunities for error were massive.

It is hard to believe we were able to function before the new technologies.  Somehow we did but I can remember well the grief when components arrived on site in the wrong material or the wrong size.  I cannot say that mistakes never creep in but with the aid of computers we have managed the problems down to a minimum.

Yes, when the new technologies go wrong it drives me crazy but there is no way we would choose to go back to what seems like the stone age but is probably just a couple of decades ago. Long live the digital revolution!

Well that’s it; the last budget before the general election. How will it affect the the market for home improvements and bespoke fitted furniture in particular?

Well, assuming that many of the provisions pass into legislation, and that’s no certainty, given the probability (if the polls are right) that this government will not be returnd to power, the budget has been largely judged as ’safe’ or ‘nuetral’, apart from some of the more right-wing press who are baying to know how Mr Darling intends to cut government borrowing by 50% in four years. Come on guys, either you are being disingenuous  your you are seriously niave.  Its the election stupid!

However, even in a modest budget, there were some crumbs for the home improvement market: the stamp duty holiday for first-time buyers on properties worth up to £250,000 means that some of the people notably absent from the housing market in recent years will now have up to an extra £2.5k available to spend.  OK, they’re unlikely to spend it on a fitted bedroom, more likely it will subsidise the massive deposit they need to raise and, because its only a two year window, they will need to get their skates on. Factor in 6 months house hunting and due process and they will only have 18 months to seal the deal. That should allow people further up the scale to start trading up again and open up the possibility of some useful enquiries from the movers rather than the improvers who have kept us warm the recession. A hogh percentage of movers are looking to install a home office as soon as they move in these days andthat more and more of our customers work from home that creates more opportunities when the housing market is positive. The downside is that in order to pay for this largess, our favourite clients in the £1m plus properties will now have upwards of £10k less to spend. Hey Ho, there aren’t going to be many win-win financial situations in the next decade but anything is better than stagnation.

Other upsides are the £95 billion targets for the two nationalised banks to start lending to small business, although it’s difficult to see how this can be done without lowering the barriers to entry and a concommitant uptick in borrower defaults.

The mooted reduction in business rates for SMEs can only be a good thing and the gradually improving statistics on unemployment and Thursday’s better than expected month on month retail figures are encouraging.

All home improvement companies will need to be on top of your game for the next year or three but thank goodness Options Furniture has such a loyal following of old customers who come back time and time again and keep on recommending their family and friends.

Looking through this week’s customer feed back forms, I found some of the comments generous to the point of embarrasement but I particularly liked ‘it’s always a pleasure to do business with Options’.

Most customers of the fitted furniture market have a room(s) and a storage requirement(s) coupled with an aeshetic preference and a budget. The job of the fitted furniture designer is to examine the first two issues and produce a design that a adresses the need within the constraints of the latter two.

Occassionaly, the client will have produced the design themselves and simply require that the supplier produces and installs the furniture from the customers choice of materials and within the budget. This sounds simple, but where does the consumer go to find this service?

In the first instance, they need a supplier with the necessary craft skills (carpenter, joiner or cabinet maker)  together with the ability to source the materials and a workshop or production facility to convert those materials into finished products.  The supplier will also need the communication skills to understand the client’s expectations and the drafting expertise and understanding of construction methods that will allow them to convert the aspiration into detailed working drawings to be fed back to the client such as to assure them that the finished product will be what they thought first thought of . Sounds simple, but it aint!

A lifetime in the furniture market, both bespoke and custom-made and observing how often the process can fail, convinces me of the essential need for great care on the consumer’s part when embarking on this path. Firstly, the necessary combination of craft, communication and drafting skills will rarely be found in one person. I can think of a few highly skilled master cabinet makers  who are multi-skilled enough to pull it off but these are highly skilled individuals whose services do not come cheap. Also such super stars of the fitted furniture market can be prima donnas who may find it difficult to subjugate their own design skills to those of their clients who have strong ideas of their own.  If you have a big budget and are willing to place your precious concept in the hands of a master like Mark Wilkinson or John Makepiece you will not be disappointed.

For most people, with more modest budgets, the road is set with pitfalls. Try the major fitted furniture companies like Hammonds or Sharps but expect to be told that ‘this is what we do and we will be pleased to fit our products to your needs and aspirations’. Be prepared to compromise. You could employ a carpenter but insist on precise documentation that guarantees you will get exactly what you wished for or that will empower you to reach a satisfactory conclusion in the event that you don’t. Also, with the carpenter, establish whether he/she has access to a remote production facility that allows your furniture to be manufactured and finished off-site or expect to entertain your tradesman in your home for days or weeks and to live with the disruption and the smell of glues and varnishes for some time after they leave.

There is another route: find a small to medium sized bespoke fitted furniture manufacturer that employs skilled and trained designers with the required communication skills, a draftsman (man or woman), a qualified cabinet maker who knows how to turn a design into a set of manufacturing instructions, a production facility with skilled bench joiners and the capacity to custom-make and finish  individual pieces of furniture that will fit together to form a perfectly fitted installation in your home, and carpenter installers selected for their craft skills and demeanor that will make the short period in your home (usually one or two days per room) a pleasurable experience.

Here are a few furniture installations designed by client’s and interpreted, manufactured and installed by Options Fitted Furniture.

Having looked at the grey market in fitted furniture and at the younger generation with their interest in home entertainment units and home cinema, their is an important demographic who are not necessarily consumers in their own rights but who excercise a very strong influence over the demand for fitted bedrooms and fitted home offices. These youngsters, generally from privileged backgrounds, have growing storage need for clothes, sports equipment, musical instruments, also teenagers can benefit from having their own study areas in which to work for their GCSEs and A levels.

Here we have a kid’s room for a young boyshowin a typical male proclivity for collecting, in this case an impressive range of soft toys

young boys learning their history through play on a custom made bunk bed/castle

and a young girl full of  ’joi de vivre’ as a princess in her bespoke palace.

Supportive parents, who may be investing thousands of pounds in school fees and extra tutoring to give their children the best possible start in life, will often go te extra mile by providing fitted bedrooms with specific study areas as in this girl’s bedroom with seperate dressing table and desk areas

or this (oddly tidy) boy’s room with its functional desk and bookshelving.

As you can see, whilst generally not economic consumers of the fitted furniture market in their own right, kids have an enormous influence.

Having looked at the grey market’s demand for bespoke fitted furniture, how important are our younger consumers?

With the exception of some very priveliged teenagers who’s parents are able to provide them with their own home office or study area and occasionally much younger children who enjoy a fully fitted bedroom (more on kid’s rooms later), younger people usually become consumers of custom made fitted furniture when setting up their first homes in their early 20s.

Often clients in this age group will be into home entertainment and home cinema in a big way and will often want contemporary wall furniture to accomodate the technology. This means that the fitted furniture often has to take 2nd place after the hi-fi, flat screen TVs and surround sound systems.

It is not unusual to see thousands of pounds worth of shiny new tecchnology sitting on the cardboard boxes it came in. Sometimes the owners settle for something from Ikea but those with sufficient disposable income will often give their expensive new toys the environment they deserve.

Occassionaly, a real film buff will splash out on the full home cinema, even using one room exclusively for that purpose, although such luxury is often beyond the reach of younger, first time, homeowners.

Often new home owners will find their starter home or new-build dockland’s flat presents a challenge for housing all their clothing, especially for couples. Although budgets can be restraining, the solution is often to be found in the bespoke furniture designer’s skill in maximising every spare inch of storage space, an option often not available with ready made wardrobes, drawer chests and cupboard units.

Younger clients present particular problems in designing viable storage solutions, often within tight budgets but the modern trend for minimalism, simplicity and straight lines often helps reduce costs and customers starting out on the home ownership adventure are an important part of any fitted furniture makers client portfolio.

Having looked at the segmentation of Option’s fitted furniture market and concluded that one specific demographic consists of the over 50s, retirees and empty nesters; what can we make of that conclusion and how are Options set to service this sector?

Well, as previously stated, the average age of an Options designer is 63 and as a team, we are clearly part of this demographic and attuned to the aspirations of our peer group.

As with my overview of the bespoke fitted furniture market, there are many shades within this group. However, there are some generalisations we can make: many of our older clients set up home and started their families in the 1960s, 70s and 80s and will often have pieces of furniture from G Plan, Nathan, Ercol or Mackintosh that are much treasured and typical of these decades. British furniture of this period was generally well made and many of the designs have become classics, further; some of the older generations will have set their taste in cabinet furniture during this period and will, understandably, be looking for like quality and aesthetic.

Options’ high build-quality and our craft skills at using real woods and colour matching them to clients’ existing furniture set us apart from most of the competition, enabling us to achieve high levels of customer satisfaction where a retro look is required.

On the other hand; many of this demographic are tired of their old furniture, which may have taken a battering during the child raising years and they may be ready to ‘chuck out the chintz’. While still looking for high build-quality, this group are often avid readers of Homes and Gardens and may be looking for all that is modern and funky. Options designs skills and production flexibility mean that we can do modern and funky with the best of them.

Older clients often have a lot of treasured collectibles, ranging from vinyl LPs to fine porcelain, sports trophies or costume dolls and they often require specialised storage and/or display areas incorporated into their fitted furniture. Options’ custom manufacturing facility allows the designer to meet such needs precisely.

Empty Nesters are another group within the older demographic that Options are well set to service. Some people sell up and downsize, releasing equity to ensure that their retirement home is fitted out to perfectly meet their needs, others prefer to stay in the family home, amongst the happy memories of the child-raising years. Empty rooms now open up the possibilities of having fitted study furniture from which to pursue hobbies or voluntary work whilst clients with increased leisure time may be looking for a home entertainment unit for their hi-fi and music collections or even, a full home cinema.

There are now more over 65s than under 18s in the UK and 80% of the country’s wealth, 60% of savings and 40% of disposable income is now held by the over 50s. By 2030 50% of the population will be over 50.

A mature sales force and a propensity to meet the demands of the grey market are serious strengths for any home improvement company.

Having looked at the possibilities of segmenting the Options’ fitted furniture client base and having come to the conclusion that the only useful segmentation was by age; I want to look at how the age demographic might work in our favour and how Options as a company is set service to the various segments of the bespoke furniture market.

On a recent day, visiting potential clients, I explored the boundaries of our geographic marketing and some age demographics with interesting results. At my first call, in Oxford, I met a couple of retired ‘empty nesters’ who have since placed an order for living room, display and storage units in a real wood veneer to match some of their existing furniture, acquired over decades of family life. Very typical Options clients.

My next call was in Hertfordshire with a young couple of, first generation, African immigrants, hard working, aspirational and with a growing family. This call resulted in an order for a home study from our Simplicity range, half the value of the first call but, interestingly, within three weeks they referred some friends, from Bedfordshire, with an identical demographic who may spend nearly twice as much on a Simplicity fitted bedroom.

Call three was a young, single, professional flat dweller in north London who needed a very specific, bespoke wardrobe to fit an awkward space, and who insisted on a real mahogany finish in character with the Victorian house in which his flat is, the top end of our product range.

Typical Options clients? Yes, but about as diverse as it gets.

How are we set up to service such broad demographics? Well, the average age of an Options fitted furniture designer is 63, so we are all able to empathise with the first group and understand and interpret their requirements.
Back at the ranch, the MD is a young family man and the average age in the office is close to half that of the design team.

These are the people who control the product offering and interpret the designers’ designs and direct the production and installation crews to convert them into finished product.

What can we learn from my typically interesting and challenging day in the field and how do we use that knowledge to improve our performance? With such a diverse client base, and those three examples only scratch the surface, our strength is in diversity itself. We are not called Options for nothing! The demographic within Options is almost as broad as the client base and while our nationally based competitors hoover up a lot of business from customers whose requirements happen to fit with standard size, pre-manufactured product, falsely described as bespoke, we prosper by filling the gaps for the requirements of clients whose needs are more specific. In future posts, I will look at the particular segments that we service and how the diversity of our offering best suits their differing needs.