shop bought fancy furniture, how do they justify the price?

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Go and buy some black Walnut then you will see why, bloody expensive that stuff !
If you were making that from rough sawn timber its going to take a few days to get it finished.

Ollie
 
I did an assignment when at an industrial design firm, for firm making design chairs in series. So those cost about 2.5k EUR at the time (20 years ago?), the cost of manufacturing is about 1100-1200 euros, 700 euros of that was the leather, at the time they had a vault storing millions of euros in premium leather. The rest of the chair was pretty simple, welded steel frame, with integral springs, overmoulding using 2k polyurethane, and obviously the cutting and fitting of leather.
I guess with that night stand, as others have mentioned, the wood will be significant part of the cost, but maybe not as expensive as leather, but it is more work to put a nightstand together, than it is a chair (at least the simplistic ones they did).
Say that a stand like that also costs 1200 euros to make, 400 euros wood, 20 hours of manual labour at say 30 euros, 200 euros overhead. Maybe they buy the wood as rough lumber, and maybe that is a little bit cheaper, but then you get extra labour added to process it, and the risk of finding issues.
 
fas walnut for a retail customer here is $11.50 a board foot for flatsawn, 5-9" widths. Add $50 surcharge if you're a residential customer and at the site I'm looking at, a minimum 100 bf. Quartersawn is a little more and wide boards add to the cost. If you budgeted $20 a board foot for wood in that piece, you could probably cover it easily including waste. The drawers appear to be the only good wood on it (one piece, etc - other stuff is glued).

Selling furniture and making money on it locally here is about getting a customer base and doing something that doesn't cost much but that a typical buyer may find flattering for reasons that none of us would. That adds up to standard mid sizes chest of drawers more in the G&G style (but not that neat) in walnut being about $4k.

Spec and price would be a good way to go broke - there has to be some woo.
 

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