Friday, October 25, 2013

Are Luxury Furniture Pieces Made Abroad?

By Kevin Heywood


During these present times, it's much more typical for consumer products to be made offshore as businesses in every industries look to outsource production to lesser cost territories in order to lessen the expense of production. On particular industry that has accepted this trend is household furniture which in the past few years has seen an outburst in the quantity of providers outsourcing production to China. So should you be looking to purchase a high-class sofa this season, how possible is it that you'll be buying an item which is made somewhere else?

Since the 1980s, the phenomenon of commercial outsourcing has motivated virtually all industries as businesses have looked to extract further economies from the production procedure in an effort to remain competing. Seen as logical corollary towards the fad towards bulk production, virtually all businesses of scale have desired to base at least some of their manufacturing in nations like China or India in which labour expenses are dramatically less than their home market. For a labour intensive market such as home furniture production, outsourcing manufacturing has distinct rewards and as the price of shipping has diminished is becoming only very popular.

Luxury sofa manufacturing is insulated from the trend towards outsourcing simply because the profit margins at the top of the market tend to be stronger and thus are fairly protected from the cost pressures driving the trend. As high-class sofas derive their value from perceptions of style, the manufacturing method itself is often led by designers who mostly operate in the developed marketplaces and whose capabilities are much less prone to outsourcing than upholstery, tailoring and carpentry. For these reasons, expensive sofa producers have been slow to contract out their manufacturing with lots of providers deciding not to contract out entirely.

While its certainly the situation that expensive sofas maintain closer ties to the home market, during the past few decades there has been an evident fad towards outsourcing at least some of the production way to cheaper countries like China and Eastern Europe. Generally, both sofa frame manufacturing and upholstery are finished in another country whilst the sofa is completed in the home market enabling the merchants to maintain their design and workmanship credentials as part of the sales hype. For some people, this cheapens the item while some argue that it's a natural results of the globalisation of world trade.

For that reason, it could be considerably demoralising trying to find a sofa maker who remains to base their production at home. Yet, one region of the industry that remains immune to the challenges of outsourcing are manufacturers who provide bespoke to order services. Given the specific to detail nature of this kind of manufacturing, it's near impossible to outsource manufacturing without substantially impacting the grade of build and lead times of taking products to market. So if you are keen to make sure that your next sofa is of the extremely top quality, selecting a bespoke sofa could be the way onward!




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