Can You Save Money By Hiring An Interior Designer?

This may come as a surprise, but the answer is yes, you can save money by using an interior designer.  Obviously, it’s not the first thought, you’re mainly looking for a stunning new home but a barrier to entry can often be that you think Interior Design is too expensive for you and is for mansion homes only.

Although your initial thought might be ‘Really? Surely you would pay more than if you decided to do it yourself?’, the figures say otherwise. It probably won’t surprise you that interior designers can access trade discounts. So we can buy products for a lower amount than the recommended retail price, but what we wanted to look at, was just how much the client is saving.

We’ve had a look into it on one current project; here is a snapshot of what it looks like. We have taken four standard items from the project: a wardrobe, some fabric for a headboard, table lamps and a side table.

We compared the current RRP prices online with how much we pay for the products with our trade discounts. Bear in mind that whilst writing this, Black Friday is upon us, so the RRP prices will be on the lower side.

Overall, the average saving for the client is 38% – and that’s including our small 25% mark up on the products. Now, this doesn’t necessarily apply to all the products we are buying on the project, however, this does show that you can make a good saving on purchases.

We also get a generous trade discount at the major fabric companies, which can offer you huge savings on upholstery, blinds and curtains.

There are, of course, other reasons to use an interior designer on your home. There is the obvious reason; to have experts working on the design of your beautiful home.  As designers, we have access to many more products which are not available to buy or as easy to locate on the high street. So through us, you will have have the opportunity to a wider range of products.

Another important point to mention is that with an interior designer, you are only dealing with one supplier – us. We are your sole point of contact, which saves you managing contact with anywhere between 7 and 137 different suppliers. Rather than having to order and then manage all the deliveries and calls yourself, we take care of it all for you. Companies deliver at all times of the day (and night) – from very early in the morning when you might be trying to get everything sorted for the school run or prepare for your lunchtime meeting, to later in the evening when you’re out or in the middle of getting dinner ready. We save you sorting out any returns, issues or broken items (and of course, there will always be some), which in itself can become a full-time job. So as well as saving in the cost of products, you also save in time.

If you were organising everything yourself, you would also need to battle with the issue of storage – where would all the products (large and small) be stored, before they go into the finished home? Is that storage space secure, dry, easily accessible? If you were storing items in an external storage space, you would need to supply them with a comprehensive list of all the products they were going to receive.

If you wanted to go DIY, another point to think about is time spent getting all the important information across to the builders. This includes but is not limited to: a lighting and electrics schedule, a paint schedule, floor plans and elevations.