Where office furniture markups hide

On a typical office fit-out, furniture is 18–28% of the capital cost. It is also the line where the gap between what a contractor pays and what a client pays is widest, for a simple structural reason: brand list prices are public, brand net prices are not.

The three places margin gets added

• The dealer discount. Brands price to volume. A buyer placing regular orders holds a materially better net price than an occasional one, and the client is quoted off list either way unless the discount is disclosed.
• The specification swap. A quote names a brand for the chair and a category for everything else. Post-award, the category items are bought at the bottom of the range.
• The bundled line. "Workstations, storage and soft seating, lot" prevents any line-level comparison. Bundling is a pricing strategy, not a convenience.

What a verifiable furniture quote looks like

Every line carries a brand, a model code, a finish, a quantity and a unit price. Warranty term per item. Lead time per item. Freight, installation and site storage priced separately rather than absorbed. If the buyer is a dealer or agency rather than the brand, that should be visible, along with what the intermediary does for its share.

Why we buy brand-direct

We hold direct accounts with the furniture brands we specify, so the price you see is the brand price plus a stated fee for our work, not a marked-up net masquerading as a list discount. It also means a warranty claim goes to the manufacturer with our purchase order behind it, rather than to an intermediary who has moved on.

Three questions worth asking

• Who is the invoice from, the brand or a reseller?
• What is the warranty term, and who honours it in year four?
• If we cut the order by 20%, does the unit price change? A quote that cannot answer this was not built from unit rates.