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- A furniture dealer recently said to us, “The more unique an object is, the less willing a consumer is to part with their money for that object. No one really gives much thought to a cup of coffee or a pack of gum, but a customer will contemplate buying a chair or painting for their house for days, weeks, or even years."
- A poignant definition of capitalism is the Marx description of a circuit in which money (M) is exchanged for commodities (C) to be sold for a larger sum of money (M’), in a never-ending metamorphosis of M-C-M’. In selling unique objects however, one should be concerned with the dashes of the circuit, all of the irrationalities that the consumer brings to the exchange. The dashes are a leap of faith that determines success or failure in selling the object.
- We envision the process like a fishing trip, you prepare yourself before you enter the sales floor by saying to yourself, “today is the day, today we will find that customer who will buy our objects.”
- In our limited experience, the consumer doesn’t act as willing to buy as they do in our minds. They walk through our wares sometimes with an awkward contemplation, sometimes an ambivalent meandering around the objects, as if the objects never existed.
- The problem for us becomes selling our products to people that don’t feel an immediate need or desire to buy them. Customers don’t seem to buy contemplatively. This feels to us unrealistic and completely different from how other business operate.
- It’s really hard to actually get what an object is worth to produce. How long it takes to make or how many design failures happen before arriving at the finished product are arbitrary factors determining the price. It could be totally fair to price an object at 3,000 dollars, but if it isn’t perceived to be $3,000 by the consumer, then it is actually worth less. The question then becomes for us, “is this object really worth making?”
- Art and design are exactly like venture capitalism. We had a relative who recently passed away who was a venture capitalist. He attempted to sell revolutionary fleet management technology to the United States military. He worked on his idea for the last 15 years of his life, with the military pondering the technology for that entire time. He attempted to sell them with the only compensation being his dream of the big payoff. He died of a simple complication with diabetes he didn’t know he had. We saw him in the final weeks of his life as a blind man failing to sell his good health to his family. We think of him when we are selling. We think of him when someone loves one of our objects, but not for the amount that we are asking.
- These thoughts are reminders that help us keep track of the indeterminate time we wait for a customer to make a decision. Design masks our restrained desperation for a sale and it masks our failures from our customers. As we continue to design and sell, these thoughts will always accompany us.
