What to Do When Your Client Is Out-Shopping You
Earlier this year, Sabrina Alfin of San Francisco–based residential interior design studio Sabrina Alfin Interiors got out-shopped by a client. Her proposal for a project included a European-made light fixture that the aforementioned client went on to source on Google Images and purchase without telling her, for some $150 less than she could get it for her net trade price. Alfin was not pleased. As would be the case for any designer dealing with a customer going around or above their creative decisions and playing their role—or trying to.
It’s an awkward situation, of course. Telling a client to back off isn’t easy—and could backfire as far as possible leads and future collaborations go. Handling things graciously is also tricky. But, as Alfin learned, there are a few ways to protect your work.
One is to review the terms and conditions of a new project even before contracts are signed. Alfin has made that a habit: “I’ve since positioned this to prospective clients as ‘I do it all, or I don’t do it’—in a nice way, of course—for quality-control reasons,” she says. “I tell them that if I don’t do the purchasing of items I’ve specified, or if they purchase ‘similar’ but not the same items, it could affect the design outcome. And if that’s the case, I don’t want my name or my company’s name associated with the work.”
Trade partners, too, should help designers watch out for clients looking to get discounted products or even posing as creatives themselves. Per Alfin, that can be done by vetting the people to whom they give accounts. “Some ask for professional association membership cards, like ASID or IIDA, but many do not,” she says.
Not sharing the names and model numbers of the selected products is also a smart move, at least to the degree allowed by today’s ubiquitous access to online image search. “Do we then go back to simple word descriptions and hard-copy proposals? I don’t know. We might have to,” Alfin says. Same goes for keeping resources to yourself—particularly if a client’s goal is to determine your markup.
“When people want to know what my markup is, I ask them, ‘When was the last time you walked into Bloomingdale's and asked them what their cost was on that designer handbag you just paid $5,000 for? The answer, of course, is never,” Alfin says. “The price is the price. They can buy it or not.”
In these cases, Alfin leans on her contract. “The language states that my pricing will never exceed MSRP, and I always give my clients two to three options for the same spec in a range of pricing. And because they never would have found that item without my help, that service level alone is worth the markup, even if you don’t count the time for order tracking and order troubleshooting.”
Laurie Lazure, founder of social media network Interior Design Community, shares similar views. “Many items can have lots of different custom specifications. It’s not as simple as ordering a sofa. The designer may specify certain levels of quality in manufacturing, fabric choices, trim choices, leg and feet choices, et cetera. With each order, he or she helps to navigate the long line of choices to get their client the exact look they need to complete the design.”
That expertise should be used as leverage throughout the course of a project—and, if necessary, imposed over a sneaky or wannabe-creative client.
“Any designer offers a high level of service from the moment of order to installation,” Lazure says. “Clients going on their own are totally ordering blind. They may get something well-made, they may not. It’s a crap shoot.”
Alfin agrees. “For a certain clientele, they want to be involved in the aesthetics, but would rather pay someone to execute. This is what one has to drive home from the beginning,” she says. “The trick for designers is figuring out what type of client they are signing on [with] before they do so, and that’s often hard to assess at the beginning of a relationship.”
Would Alfin ever consider going to court over an out-shopping dispute? “It really depends on how egregious the offense is,” she says. “ If the client is buying stuff I never specified and telling people it was my design, or, conversely, buying things that I specified and then claimed he or she was the designer, those are things that can hurt my business and reputation more than whether or not I collected the $500 markup on a coffee table.”
As for the client who purchased the light fixture, Alfin decided to terminate the purchasing side of their contract. “I’ve since updated my contract language to say that if my company sources the item, my company buys the item,” she says. “This was not, unfortunately, expressly stated in my previous contract language, but now it is.”
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
