With most luxury furniture companies, only a fraction of each dollar you spend is actually used to build your sofa. Let?s look at just a few of the other things you?re paying for when you shop with big retailers. more than just a sofa FIELD TRIP! One company bragged about photographing a new line in Paris for their catalog. But the furniture was shot in an empty studio that could have just as easily been in Paris, Texas. C'est la vie! PHOTO SHOOTS You hired a team and flew them - along with thousands of pounds of furniture - around the world to exotic locales and grand homes. Their job? Make your furniture look better than it really is. photo editors graphic artists set stylists movers assistants interior designers lighting designers painters carpenters electricians marketing execs photographers OH SO MANY CATALOGS You paid to print millions of full-color pages, bind them, wrap them in plastic, and mail them to seemingly every household in America. Yes, they're as useless as a phone book, but they're even more expensive. Don?t fret over sending two or three duplicate copies to a single household?more is better, and environmental waste is someone else?s problem. SHOWROOMS You built a showroom. In the most expensive shopping area. In every major city in America. You spared no expense, with palatial buildings, theatrical lighting, and thousands of square feet of space to furnish, staff, and air condition. Advertising & PAID PLACEMENT You bought that eight-page spread in last month?s interior design magazine. And again for this month. And also next month. Did you see your sofa on the home makeover show? Did the star of the show touch the sofa or mention the brand name? The TV network?s fee for that publicity could be over $1,000,000. You've got...SPAM! Huge companies are competing for your attention, so they will email you every single day. If a furniture company has a million email addresses on their recipient list and spends just half of a cent to send a message to a subscriber, the annual cost to send these emails would be nearly $2,000,000. They probably have far more than 1,000,000 subscribers. Fake Sales Most furniture companies have a special discount for interior designers - an automatic 20% removed from every item. They?re constantly running sales, specials, end-of-the-month blowouts, and more. Are these actual sales, or do they hint that the value of the product is actually far below the retail price? I'd say 90 percent of people don't know or care where something came from. And very few ask. - furniture sales person but WHAT ABOUT THE FURNITURE? Oh, yeah. That. The thing you?re actually buying. As you can imagine, there isn?t a whole lot of your dollar left. The only way to build furniture on a budget this small is to do so in tremendous quantities, using the cheapest materials and the cheapest labor. That means mass production with sub-standard components in overseas factories. SO...What?s it MADE from? Good question. What?s presented as leather may actually be ?leather composite? made from ground-up scraps and plastic. (We know, because we sell our leather scrap to the company who makes it.) Seating surfaces might be genuine leather, but the rest of the sofa could be vinyl. Cheap, fragile, uncomfortable sinuous suspension systems will be used in place of higher-end products, and frames will be built with inadequate bracing and joinery. Cushions will be light and spongy, lacking the long-term performance of a higher-quality component. The money that went into marketing your new sofa had to come from somewhere, and unfortunately the sofa itself is a lesser product as a result. We?re sorry. Really. BAIT and SWITCH We have it on good authority that a certain national brand shows durable, American-made sofas in their luxurious showrooms. But the furniture that arrives at customers? homes is actually made in China to noticeably lower standards. It actually gets worse Overseas factories aren?t subject to the health and safety regulations of domestic plants, putting workers and you at risk. It?s hard to know which materials and chemicals are used during manufacturing and transit, or what you?re bringing home. My biggest concern with domestic production comes from all of the regulations placed on U.S. manufacturers. None of these requirements are placed upon the imports. - Furniture Industry Exec the molecular formula of dimethyl fumarate, an antifungal chemical sprayed on furniture prior to transoceanic shipping. known to cause of burns, rashes, and allergic reactions when exposed to skin.