Dorset has a very long tradition of artisan craftsmen, Thomas Hardy’s family were carpenters, roofers and bricklayers, Mary Anning’s father was a cabinet maker and John Makepiece, possibly England’s finest living furniture maker, is based at Parnham House near Beaminster so, as you would expect, the county is full of individual bespoke furniture makers turning out fine quality hand-crafted real wood furniture.

However, I’ll warrant that most of that craftsmanship finds its way out of Wessex and is gracing boardrooms and grand houses throughout the UK and worldwide.

So what can Options Fitted Furniture bring to the party? Options fill a unique niche in the home furnishing market by offering good quality, middle price range, custom made bedroom, home study and living room cabinetry at prices that are competitive with mass production manufacturers but with the flexibility of  one-off production, making every installation unique and special without costing the earth.

All the big name players in this industry are active in Dorset and the county is well served by makers of fine quality bespoke furniture but for thousands of west country home makers who struggle to make their aspirations fit their budgets the Options’ method might just fit the bill.

Showroom staff are, generally, not highly paid, career orientated individuals; so sitting in a shop for up to eight hours a day will often induce what I call ’showroom stupor’ and when a visitor does appear it can be difficult to get your mind in gear, lay down your newspaper, book or crossword and engage sufficiently with that precious prospective new client in the first few vital seconds that can avoid a missed opportunity.

What fitted furniture and other home improvement businesses must do to avoid these tragically wasted chances is not only train their showroom staff but incentivise them; and pecuniary rewards are usually the biggest incentive  of all either at a price per appointment or for meeting a target. The danger here is that an over zealous showroom assistant will upset prospective clients by badgering them to make an appointment or will produce lots of poor quality leads that disincentivise the designers. By far the best practice is to find your reception staff other clerical or customer liaison duties that keep their brains active and avoid the showroom stupor whilst giving them a bonus based on the total number of sales per month from new clients.

Better still, build your showroom next to your fitted furniture production facility or workshop and merge the customer service and sales roles, spend what you save on High Street costs on advertising or website optimisation to induce your clients to visit the showroom where parking is probably a lot easier anyway. Your customers will enjoy the closeness to the manufacturing facility, you can even incorporate factory tours into the sales process, and your showroom staff will have the opportunity to share the whole ordering through to fulfillment process and feel much more valued.

After being left to their own devices for around ten minutes, the couple called down the stairs to thank the showroom assistant and left.

If you have any idea of the cost of  bespoke fitted furniture,  you will know that to fit out a showroom with displays of kitchens and bedroom wardrobes and drawer units requires considerable investment let alone the on-cost of heating, lighting maintaining and staffing of said emporium.

Why on earth would the owner(s) have made such an investment, presumably with the main intention of encouraging members of the general public to make appointments with a designer in order to obtain designs and quotations that would, in some instances, have led on to orders – the life blood of any business – being placed for the supply and installation of new fitted kitchens, bathrooms, fitted bedrooms and home study/offices; and then have the business of making said appointments in the hands of somebody so under trained and/or motivated as to let an opportunity slip away?

Perhaps the business generates sufficient sales from personal recommendations – which should be the primary source of any home improvement business – without needing new enquiries from the showroom; but, if so, why waste precious resources on a showroom at all? If the showroom just serves as a resource for customers to choose their designs, finishes, door types, worktops handles and appliances, why bother to undertake the expense of a high street premises when all you need is somewhere adjacent to your workshop, warehouse or factory on a trading estate?

Most likely, the owner is unaware of what is happening at his shiny new showroom and bewails the apparent low level of interest.

I will return to this topic next week.

Kevin’s principle number 27 is “Buy Authentic, buy only stuff that is made in a firm’s own factories where they look after the people they employ and the place where they are based”. Can we apply this advice to the purchase of bespoke fitted furniture for the home and if so why?

In part Kevin is speaking out against slave labour production in India and the far east, and who would not support him in that? He also refers to the carbon impact of importing manufactured goods from around the world. Obviously, you would not expect your made to measure fitted wardrobes to fall into those two categories – although I can’t be certain that some of the larger fitted bedroom and home office suppliers aren’t outsourcing abroad, they do shift standard size doors in large volume so the option must be open to them.

The relevant point in K Mc’s article is the sense of authenticity and pride in ownership that comes from buying hand-crafted products made in a small workshop and the connection with the craftsmen who make and install your furniture. He does live on a slightly different planet to the majority of us, being a highly successful television presenter, author and businessman and his propensity to extol the virtues of only buying the finest quality, ethically produced, organic and hand knitted products does seperate him from a large section of the Grand Designs audience; who must be average-income, wage-slaves like me; who’s life styles would become much constrained if we had to choose between a unique, hand-forged, wrought iron table lamp or a B&Q £20.00, imported equivalent plus a couple of opera/football tickets. The former giving employment to one worthy master crafstsman in a nearby village and the latter supporting the infrastructure that employs thousands of needy shop workers in the UK, many employees along an extensive supply chain and exploits but keeps from starvation a family in Indonesia or Somalia, as well as maintaining the whole panoply of people employed in providing our entertainments from sport to culture. Complex questions!

However, like Kevin, I have moving testimonials from clients who take great pride in their bespoke furniture that I and my colleagues have helped them to conceive and realise and who take satisfaction from the fact that they have seen the workshop in which it was made and enjoy the uniqueness and authenticity of their bespoke product.

We discussed the DIY and flat-pack options, both of which are popular and practical as long as you  are aware of the limitations.

The third option is to consult with one or more of the professional design, build and fit companies. These are easy to find in the pages of newspaper supplements and home-interest magazines or by googling ‘fitted furniture’. This will give you the choice of about one and a half million hits!

So, how do you sort through so many websites to find the fitted furniture supplier for you? Firstly, add a regional suffix to your search criteria; such as ‘fitted furniture Surrey’. That should leave you with a managable number of around 50,000, although, you probably won’t go far beyond the 1st or 2nd page .  Or you could add a more specific prefix such as ‘bespoke’ fitted furniture.

The next thing to do is to consider what the types of hit can tell you about the companies that appear. The first three links at the top of the page and those on the right hand side are PPC or pay-per-click adverts, if you click on one of these a small sum of money, say 10p to a pound or two, will be charged to the advertiser and eventually to you the consumer.

You may then see some local ‘place’ links that are another revenue raising idea of Google’s and can be helpful if you wish to confine your search to a very localised area, remember: Google knows where you are!

The next links are the ‘organic’ or ‘generic’ listings which will take you to the websites that Google has explored and concluded that they contain information relevant to your search, arranged in descending order of relevance. These rankings are chosen by Google by objective analysis of the content but do not indicate a recommendation.

Next up: web search directories.

Estate agents were a bit of a sitting target but she certainly hit the nail on the head with sofa retailers and it was fascinating to see all the big chains like DFS running for the hills and only the Johnnie-come-lately group FCS (what is it with sofa shops and initials?) prepared to take her on. I was delighted to see that the FCS managing director, who obviously runs a tight ship; as evidenced by his sales staff’s strict adherence to the annoyingly precise script when greeting visitors to the company’s stores, was prepared to listen and then to dispense with those 50% off lies that the mainstream retail furniture industry is infested with.

When I worked for the now defunct Times Furnishing chain we had two sales a year, one in January and the other in July, when we genuinely reduced the price of showroom stock, some of it tired or soiled, or just plain discontinued. Admittedly, we boosted the two week sale by buying in some specialy discounted lines that manufacturers would produce in a limited range of upholstery colours or in the case of bedroom wardrobes and chests of drawers in a cheaper wood veneers (foils, vinyls and laminates were rare or non-existant in those days) but these bought in sale lines were always billed as ’special purchase’. What we did not do was constantly insult the buying public’s intelligence with false claims of 50% discounts and special offers.

Mind you, I do sometimes wonder about the great British public’s collective intelligence; clearly chains like DFS, Furniture Village and Sharps Bedrooms, who persist in their mendacious claims are still highly profitable. Whilst interviewing shoppers  outside the now ingenuous FCS, and generally receiving plaudits, Mary heard one punter say: ‘I’m going over to DFS because they’ve got a sale on.

I sincerely hope that FCS prosper and I will certainly be paying them a visit the next time that I am in the market for a sofa.

I am very proud to be in the bespoke fitted furniture market and in spite of the fact that a lot of major competitors tell lies about their pricing policies, most of the independent companies serving this industry do play it straight and offer genuine value for money.

I ended 2010 with a series of blogs posts looking at how to plan or design your own home office or study and I thought it might be good to start 2011 with some thoughts on how to set out a fitted bedroom.

The first point of reference is, of course, the size and position of the bed. Most people prefer to sleep facing or at a right angle to the window raher than with their head to the window, principally so that they can see the sky on waking. Also, the window wall is often the coldest part of a bedroom and usually where the radiator goes, making it dificult to have a headboard which might, in any case obscure part of the window and rob the room of light.

The size of the bed will partly be a factor of whether it is to be a single or a double (I have never heard of a triple bed but it might be an option). Couples occasionally opt for twin beds but this option is largely reserved for the elderly, young children sharing or the stars of early 20th century American romantic comedies. Bed sizes can be confusing; in the UK the traditional double bed has always been 4ft 6inches (135 cm) wide, a small double is 4ft (12o CM) wide and a single 3 ft (90 CM) wide. Small singles and bunk beds are usually 2ft 6inches and in the 1960s a large double or king size of 5ft or 1500 CM was introduced and today we have a super king size 6ft (180 Cm wide). These are still the designations given by the National Bed Federation and the Sleep Council, however, these sizes refer only to the mattress size and the frame or bed ends can add a considerable amount.

A further complication arises from the fact that we now import beds and mattresses from all over the world and in particular from Europe and, to a lesser degree, America. All of these countries have their own standards for bed sizes and, no doubt we will soon be buying from the developing world and certainly China with a whole new range of ’standards’.

So, before even thinking about designing your own fitted bedroom or talking to a fitted bedroom designer, start by deciding what size bed you are going to use and how much spoace it will need.

Next time I will be looking at what you need in the way of cabinetry.

Sure you expect the installation of your fitted wardrobes or home office furniture to run smoothly and be right first time but, in the best of all possible worlds, problems do occur.

A professional bespoke furniture supplier will have a sophisticated project management system in place and will employ a team of people, each with an allocated role in the process, typically: designer, draftsman, surveyor, production scheduler, bench joiner, sprayer/finisher, quality controller, delivery driver, installer/fitter and administrater. That’s ten individuals, each with a key role to play in ensuring that the process runs smoothly, fits in with your programme and achieves a result that meets, and hopefully exceeds, your expectations.

In today’s difficult trading conditions, no supplier can hope to stay competitive without the leanest possible infrastructure, and yet, all ten of these key roles must be fulfilled and their functions coordinated or customer satisfaction is put at risk. The independent carpenter cannot be expected to wear ten hats at once and, although their partner may act as administrator and some functions, such as delivery driver and installer can be combined, much functionally within the project is put at risk by not having independent oversight.

There is an old carpenter’s adage that says ‘measure twice, cut once’ and it is a sound principle when applied to making and installing anything custom-made or bespoke. However, the protection provided by this practice is far greater when the second measure is conducted by a third party. it’s far too easy to repeat an error when checking you own work. Effectively, an efficient fitted furniture maker take the measurements four times: the designer on the first visit, the draftsman who ‘closes the survey’ by adding together all the designer’s measurements and angles: wall, window, right angle, wall, alcove, right angle, wall, doorway,right angle, wall,  pillar wall and , hopefully arrives back at the same place. If correct, the survey closes, if not a mis-measure is suspected. The job is than re-measured by the surveyor before manufacture and finally, for the fourth time by the fitter, on-site, before he begins the installation.

Management of  the project is the key role of the administrator whose job it is to coordinate the functions of the other nine members of the team, ensuring a smooth process and a delighted customer.

That’s a lot to ask of even the most talented carpenter.

Now lets look at how you might gain from the experience of others: If you do use a carpenter, be sure to ask to talk to some of his old customers and, if possible, see some of his work. Not only does this compensate for the lack of a showroom but the opportunity to share somebody else’s experience could give you the confidence you need and help avoid a costly mistake.

Any well established cabinet making company will be able to furnish you with the details of past customers in your area but you may find this a tiresome and embarrassing experience, asking complete strangers to let you into their home to look at their fitted bedoom furniture. Many people find looking through letters of recommendation or ‘testimonials’ a much more user friendly excercise.

A proper fitted furniture specialist with a showroom you can visit and an adminastrative infrastructure should keep a library of letters of commendation that you can browse through. If they have not received any such letters, be very suspicious.

Ideally, you should be presented with a book or folder containing a substantial number of testimonials dated over a long period of time, perhaps several years. Do be cautious; look for different types of paper, handwriting and styles. Pick one at random and ask to see the drawings that relate to this client. Surely, nobody would create false letters of satisfaction? Would they??

Also, bear in mind that these commendations have been audited. Any company that has been in business over a period of years will have received letters of complaint – surprisingly, these will not be included in the folder!

Look out for phrases like ‘We were annoyed when we discovered that he wrong doors had been delivered but were very impressed that you sorted the problem out so promptly and with the minimum of fuss’. Everybody makes mistakes sometimes and a good supplier will earn more Brownie points for sorting out the inevitable problems efficiently than they might from getting right first time.

Do not settle for the film or theatre promoter’s trick of just quoting short phrases like ‘We are very impressed by the quality’, when the full phrase might have been ‘We are very impressed by the quality it’s just a pity that the after sales service was so appalling’. Insist on seeing the full text.

Clearly, the carpenter should be less expensive and sometimes price comparisons will be decisive. However, there are times when price is not the only factor and you are entitled to good reasons for spending more hard-earned cash than you need to.

Today’s reason for going to to an established company of cabinet makers is the guarantee.

A fitted bedroom or home office furniture should not cost as much as your car but you will be looking at an expenditure in thousands rather than hundreds of pounds and you should expect a minimum of ten years trouble free service.

Certainly, your new living room or home cinema furniture will not be subject to the stresses and strains of the family motor but it will have moving parts and surfaces designed to withstand the wear and tear of domestic life. Servicing or replacing components such as hinges or drawer runners can be tedious and expensive.

More important, is the confidence that comes from knowing that your supplier is making and installing product designed to last.

However, a guarantee is worth nothing if the manufacturer goes out of business or, in the case of an independent tradesman, moves away or becomes unobtainable. In today’s difficult trading conditions, retailers and suppliers of domestic goods, large and small, can disapera overnight.

The best guarantee for any high ticket item is one that is backed by an insurance policy. Do not expect to have to purchase an insurance guarantee, It should be paid for by the supplier. This not only ensures that you will still benefit from the warrantee whatever happens to the insaller but also that your supplier has been checked out by the insurers. Insurance companies work hard to minimise their exposure to risk and they don’t underwrite guarantees for companies or individuals with Arthur Daley credentials.

OK, reasons to be careful: Make sure you get a proper design before hand so you can be confident the end product will match your expectations, ensure that the product quality is what you are seeking, expect to see samples of materials and finished product to benchmark the installation and insist on an insurance backed guarantee from a specialist insurer such as the Consumer Protection Association.

More to follow.