Let's face it, buying furniture is no walk in the park – from choosing the right style, to designing the perfect palette, it can be a stressful process with several seemingly huge decisions in selecting important investment pieces for your home.
The last thing you need is the added pressure of a time-boxed promotion or seasonal sale – tactics our industry is notorious for, with most traditional retailers pressuring our customers to make decisions on their timeline.
If you know Maiden Home by now, you've probably guessed that our approach is radically different. In this post, we’re taking you behind the scenes of the furniture industry to understand why other companies discount and why we’ve taken a stand against this standard practice – choosing instead to deliver the best value in high-end, custom furniture every day of the year.
The Old Guard:
In industries like fashion or electronics, sales are an efficient way to get rid of older merchandise whose value inherently drops as time goes on. This makes sense – a winter coat becomes less useful as summer months arrive, and newer technology pushes out older models. But in the furniture industry, seasons have less of an impact on the relevance of a particular style. In other words, you probably won’t switch out your leather sectional with a white linen one come summer, and the likelihood that your neutral sofa will be out of style in just a few months is low - thank goodness.
So there are really only two reasons why a furniture company will discount their furniture: The first is if a style isn’t selling as well as they’d hoped and they need to liquidate their stock to free up space for more successful pieces in their distribution centers. The second is to create a sense of “urgency” surrounding your purchase to drive sales during a particular period. This means you're forced to buy on their schedule - constantly checking your inbox, anxious that you’re going to miss out on the next, bigger promotion.
The worst part of this vicious cycle of discounting is that in order to safely discount later in the season, companies must inflate their original prices to protect their profit margins. So for the exact same product, one customer is getting closer to the true value of a piece, while another is paying a premium. That doesn’t seem fair to us.
A New Approach:
When we founded Maiden Home, we wanted to build a better, more transparent way to for modern customers to buy beautiful, handmade furniture. Coming to this business as outsiders, we were able to see with fresh eyes that so many “industry standards” were unnecessary and outdated. So we decided to up the ante.
This started with the fundamentals of our business model - stripping out the norms of the industry like expensive, flashy marketing, showrooms in high-rent locations, and warehouses filled with trendy, seasonal items. Our mission was to create a model that invests every penny of your dollar into the quality of your furniture, delivering the best value in timeless custom furniture without any of the anxiety, frustration, and confusion that comes with seasonal (and sometimes random) sales and promotions.
To do this, we attacked both sides of the problem: First, we don’t carry stock of our products because we make every piece to our customer’s exact specifications. This means that the price you pay for your furniture doesn’t include the cost of shipping and storing it in a warehouse. It also means we don’t have excess stock of pieces that didn’t sell. Second, we don’t inflate our prices at the launch of a product so our customers are getting the best price, every day. No stress, no negotiating, and no worrying that a sale is just around the corner. Why? Because buying furniture for your home is a personal and important decision and should be made on your schedule, not ours.
Ready to dive into building your perfect piece? A free swatch kit is a great way to start: Feel the quality of our fabrics and leathers in the comfort of your own home.
