Off-duty hero finds perfect coffee table at auction uptown

One of the most fantasized about designer tasks is their shopping on someone else’s dime. Can there be anything more wonderful than getting the ‘high’ of shopping beautiful things all the time and get paid for it on top of that?

But shopping, i.e., professional sourcing, is just so much more than that. Sometimes getting just the right piece really feels like a hero’s actions.

Shopping for a perfect artifact, or an exquisite piece of furniture or the only light fixture that seems to do the trick above your dining room table is a professional skill like any other. And like any other professional skill for hire, it can give you peace of mind and enjoyment and save you a lot of money, grief, and mistakes. It can give you the pleasure of an emotionally rewarding room and heck! it can even save marriages sometimes! 😄

The public, oftentimes misreading the literature on the subject, mistakes browsing with sourcing convinced that a designer browsing versus them browsing is nothing more than someone that is familiar with what the stores carry, does what they can do – only faster.

This cannot be further from the truth.

An amateur browses for product. An experienced designer is your sniper. They not only know where to look for and where, but first they establish criteria, parameters and style that narrow down the search to just the right amount to help you make the right decision. Then they know exactly where to look to find a small, but relevant, the pool of product that fits everything you want: from the practicality of size to aesthetic preference and suitability to a room, to budget, and last but not least, to the capacity of the client to care for and maintain the piece properly.

Not everyone is ready for a leather coffee table even though they may fantasize about it.

And so it goes, the story of the great designers that can source things from the far-out corners of an auction warehouse or the front display of a mainstream store; the story of deep knowledge of what goes where, of what will do and what will not and sometimes, when long term work relationships develop with clients, they can safely guess the 3 objects in a store that their client will go and point too – before they do.

A bit like magic, this world of sourcing!

And then the next step? It is those who actually design and build their own products, their own artifacts expressing their own view on an impeccable lifestyle – but that’s for another story yet to come.

This article first appeared in My 2 cents on design .com

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