( A non-perfectionist’s story )
Call me old fashioned. My parents taught me to value beauty in everything I experienced in life. That real beauty displayed lasting qualities while perfection on the other hand, had a limited shelf life. They were right, but the modern world I know hasn’t worked that way.
I own a small Interior Design business focusing on sustainable design.. I have a showroom where older beautiful furnishings are in original condition as well as other pieces refreshed in a bold, new style. I work hard at giving these forlorn items a new lease on life by working with an army of like-minded trades passionate about refinishing, reupholstering and repainting each item to be of unique “heirloom” quality again. You could say that I dabble in the art of divine intervention toward bringing quality pieces of older furnishings back into the consumer fold. It’s called contributing to a circular economy by reintroducing quality items back onto the consumer market. I absolutely love what I do and what I can offer to others through our interior design services. I know the offerings aren’t always perfect, they are older items to begin with, but they do exude a personality and a charm that brand new items just can’t match.
So why am I writing about how scratch & dent had almost ruined my life?
Ever since the concept of a “sale” or scratch & dent offerings entered into the conscious mainstream, society has grown accustomed to getting goods at deep discounts, especially if they are deemed blemished, flawed or last season’s goods in some way. Retailers use this as a way of moving old or barely damaged merchandise out the door. Yet the concept has grown so pervasively, like a weed, that entire shopping outlets, online stores and businesses everywhere are devoted to selling supposedly “imperfect” items at slashed prices. It doesn’t matter how minor the imperfections are anymore, even the most minor of blemishes demands a price drop of substantial means by the buying public. Some outlets don’t even sell blemished items,…it’s just stuff at a lesser quality but marketed as “flawed” in order to attract bargain hunters. Combine this with a market overloaded with retail goods and there’s bound to be judgements and comparisons by shoppers on the hunt for the next treasure. But the hunt doesn’t mean that shoppers are content with 2nd rate merchandise.
The real trick for any bona fide hunter is to find a great item and then look for the tiniest of flaws so that a demand for a discount can be made. It’s manipulative at best. This doesn’t really affect stores built around scratch and dent offerings – those stores already advertise the “what you see is what you get” aspect. Now we are in the throes of a 25 year love affair with cheap, mass produced replicas of iconic furniture styles, which are being sent to these scratch and dent stores simply because they sell – not because they are made of great quality materials. or even if they are indeed flawed. Most of these items get damaged in shipping, but the poor quality, along with the flaws, mean deals for furnishings. And really, who has a degree in bespoke furniture construction except for a furniture manufacturer? So it’s not even a matter of something truly being flawed as much as the perception by the consumer of it being so, and that is the key to expectations of pricing being lowered regularly until the item either sells or gets thrown into a landfill because it couldn’t sell. Retailers anxious to boost sales often times will bow to the demand knowing full well that the item in question may be perfectly fine.
This sense of entitlement on the consumer’s part has trickled over into my business. A business built around searching out rarities and well loved vintage goods for their beauty to restore and sell. Even fans of vintage furniture are prone to perfectionism; we can thank the fast furniture industry for that as well. Fast furniture has literally destroyed the idea of iconic vintage furnishings being special with their amazing ability to not only produce the replicas to detail, but con the public into thinking these items are “better” than the originals when in fact those replicas are purposely designed to literally fall apart in 3-5 years while the original items are still solid in their construction and able to transform through refinishing or upholstery work.
On any given day I can sit in my showroom and observe a familiar habit of initial excitement a potential buyer has upon seeing, lets say a rare Mario Bellini sofa, dissolve once a closer inspection finds a small scratch or minuscule wear & tear on the surface. All of a sudden a switch in the brain trades in beauty for need of perfection, ensuring a demand for a lower price because, well, the item is “flawed”. Never mind that this sofa may be 50 years old, a rarity, well loved and for the most part, taken care of extremely well for decades, or that it has been restored to almost showroom condition. The nominal price tag listed still isn’t good enough. In the mind of today’s consumer this vintage item should somehow look 110% brand new or else it’s not worth buying at the current price. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but that is our modern way of thinking.
I don’t mean to harp on consumers as the bad guy; they simply have been trained for over a century by manufacturers to think new is better, new is quality, new is,..uh “new” and therefore it’s somehow superior. You’ can’t fault the consumer when the marketing campaigns have been so successful as to entice them to ditch the old and buy only new. But the tide is changing. In the wake of our “Golden Age of Replicas” as I call it, starts to wane. It is because consumers are waking up to the fact that they’ve been duped by the lure of the new. The Golden Age of Replicas isn’t very golden when de-forestation continues at an alarming rate due to mass produced furniture that usually finds itself at a scratch and dent shop somewhere, waiting to be picked up at a low price by an unsuspecting consumer who thinks buying new is somehow better than old.
There’s a saying: “Buy quality once, cry once. Buy cheap once, cry a lot! ” (because you always have to spend money to replace it.) When that $5000 replica sofa you scored for half price at the scratch and dent store falls apart in 3 years and you could have had the real thing restored for less, that has already lasted 50 years and could go another 50, it gives pause as to how you’re spending your hard earned dollars.
With Gen Z and the latter half of Millennials leading the way towards sustainability practices on a global scale, it looks like a brighter future for those working in the circular economy. That’s good news to people like myself dedicated to presenting goods through a circular economy for the greater good of the planet and climate change.