What furniture actually costs — and why we charge 20%

Walk into a furniture store and see a sofa priced at $4,000. That sofa left a workshop in North Carolina — or Portugal, or Vietnam — at somewhere between $800 and $1,600. Everything between the workshop invoice and the price tag on the floor is retail overhead: showroom rent, sales staff, warehouse, brand marketing, import duty, freight, and margin.

None of that adds up to a better sofa. It adds up to a more expensive distribution chain.

Where the markup goes

The typical retail furniture markup is 2.5x to 4x the cost of goods. On a mid-range sofa:

• Workshop produces it for $900 – $1,400
• Importer marks it up 30–50% for freight, duty, warehousing
• Showroom marks it up again — 80–120% is typical
• You pay $3,500 – $5,000

That's not a scandal. Showrooms are expensive to run. But it does mean the piece you're buying is not worth what the price tag says it's worth — it's worth the workshop invoice plus reasonable logistics. The rest is the cost of getting it to you through a retailer.

What procurement does differently

Procurement cuts the retail layer out. We go to the source — workshops in Italy, Canada, Portugal, Turkey, Mexico — and buy at trade cost. No showroom floor. No brand premium. You pay what the piece actually costs to make and ship, plus our fee.

Our fee is 20% of the supplier cost. Not 20% of what retail would charge. 20% of what we actually pay.

On a $30,000 room of furniture: retail might charge $90,000–$120,000. Through procurement, you pay roughly $36,000. The room is identical. The workshops are often identical. The difference is the distribution model.

Why 20%

We run the project from end to end: supplier sourcing, purchase orders, lead time tracking, delivery coordination, quality oversight. That takes real work — hours per project, plus the relationships with workshops that take years to build.

20% is enough to run a sustainable service without gouging anyone. We could charge more. We don't, because the model only works if the savings are obvious and the fee is transparent.

• No markups hidden in the line items
• No 'handling fees' added at checkout
• No retail sticker games
• One fee, on top of supplier cost, always disclosed

What this looks like in practice

A client came to us with a living room and dining room — two sofas, a sectional, dining table and chairs, area rug, lighting, a few accent pieces. Her retail budget was $80,000. We asked for the list of what she actually needed.

Supplier cost for the full scope came to $41,000. Our 20% fee was $8,200. Total to the client: $49,200. She got the same quality of pieces — better, in some cases, because we weren't limited to what a retailer decided to stock.

The delta between $80,000 and $49,200 is not a discount. It's what was being spent on retail infrastructure she didn't need.

The catch

Procurement takes longer than walking into a store. Lead times for custom or sourced pieces run 3–10 weeks depending on the workshop. You're not picking something off a floor and taking it home on Saturday.

You're also trusting someone else to manage the process — which is why the service model matters. You're not just buying a sofa. You're buying a managed project.

That's the trade. If speed is the only variable, go retail. If you have six weeks and care about what you're actually paying for, procurement is almost always the right call.

If you're furnishing a room and want to understand what the project would actually cost — not retail cost, supplier cost — submit a brief. There's no commitment to look at a plan, and the plan shows you every line item.