How to Nail Your Market: Specification and Supply

Find The Problem.

 

Have you heard this sentence before?

“The client is unhappy”.

You have. We all have.

Everyday we hear reports of clients bemoaning sub-par brand service delivery. Every. Day.

Why?

Well, while clients are becoming increasingly demanding as design know-how continues to rise, that same client often espies a gap emerging between their specified ‘product’ and its ‘production’ and ‘delivery’. That is, questions surrounding market forces and service delivery are often kept at a distance from the very products that are affected most.

… no wonder the client is unhappy. They’re confused as well.

 

Learn Your Market. And I Mean Really Learn It.

 

Approximately thirty years ago Australia saw the real beginning of what remains to be (even to this day) an enormous design boom. Back then we had just steadily regained our balance after the internationally devastating effects of the late-Eighties market crash. And, thanks to our particularly resilient legal, business and political infrastructure – not to mention the export potential of our natural resources.

But after such impressive growth, something very odd happened. We all started thinking like retailers.

Because, as we – the A+D community ­– were mainly focused around wholesaling up to the 1990s, we inadvertently pushed further into a major structural change to the design workforce. On the retailing side, a sudden surge in design led to a huge diversification (some would say, glut) of brands and products available to the Australian consumer. While at the same time, the competitive edge of retailing meant that the public continued to have access to the wholesale brands at either an inflamed price point or discounts – both at a retail level – leaving the specifier with limited design diversity.

Meanwhile, on the side of those brands that developed rapidly into wholesaling, standard lead-time deliverables for international or custom product became (apparently) insulting when compared to the possibility of endless choice now due to a suddenly staggering level of manufacture. While catering to quickly passing trends and contributing the landfill en masse nationwide, the largest problem to arise was the ‘one size seemingly can fit all’ supply mentality. Design and customisation to individual- or user-performance, spatial-need or even just the appropriate attuning to environment became a distant memory.

Is it hardly any surprise that ‘sustainability’, ‘longevity’ and ‘responsibility’ have become watchwords for consumers and design-thinkers alike?

 

Be Disruptive. Be a Rule-Breaker. Be Smart.

 

Throughout the late 90s, Karinna Gobbo noticed the effects of such market forces taking hold across the entire supply chain of the A+D industry. In what was quickly becoming a worrying situation for the marketplace for design(ers) and their clients alike, she established Tappeti: Fine Hand-Crafted Rugs and Carpets to intervene in the swiftly vanishing art of considerate supply. Committed to the creation of exceptional pieces from large to small scale projects, Tappeti’s exhaustive range of textures, fibres, colours and finishes has set this company’s level of holistic and integrated brand service far apart from competitiors. According to Gobbo, “the difference between us is we only work with the specifier [and] the benefit of that is we have our own in-house design team to offer that something unique to you and your client”.

It might seem overblown, but Tappeti’s dedication to working with the specifier direct is more revolutionary than you might initially think. Why? Well, it has removed the bottleneck existing between supplier, specifier and result, allowing a more custom and efficient service delivery along the chain of demand.

Their portfolio of work represents a decided lack of “the client is unhappy” because the most basic foundation for Team Tappeti is that through every step of the delivery process they’re involved the exchange of information surrounding industrial requirement, production standards and market fluctuations. Their model has successfully responded to the fact that today it is no longer enough to simply retail rug and carpet finishings because suppliers should be held to just as rigorous levels of conceptual innovation as designers and modality specification as specifiers.

Evidently, the virtues of such a relationship for the relationship between clients and their specifier are manifold. For the designer, however, the Tappeti conception of brand service through maintaining such close ties with the specification sector leads to a heightened degree of budget sensitivity coupled with brisk lead-time generation. The brand works tirelessly to continue the ongoing conversation of holistic brand service and uncompromised dedication to each project, raising the bar of supplier-thinking to transform spaces into original places of depth, colour and emotion.