I am moving into a new apartment soon, and will be needing to do some
refurnishing. Frustrated by the selection and general "lameness" of
the chain stores, I visited a more exclusive "boutique", and was blown
away by how (comparably) good the sofas looked, was equally blown away
by the prices, which typically ran around the $3000 range.
Now I'm not above paying for quality, but if there is a way to order
these kinds of (usually Italian) sofas either direct from the
manufacturer, wholesale, or somehow cut out some of the cost-inflation
of the "downtown boutique" costs, I'd like to find it.
I have done a few normal Google searches, but Flash-heavy Italian-only
websites are a bit intimidating, and probably won't deliberately
undercut their resellers anyway.
A concrete example:
There is a specific black leather couch called "XL" from Calia
Furniture (http://calia.it) that retails for $3000, and I can't find
any other places on the web that even carry it. I understand that this
is a nice piece of furniture, but I honestly couldn't pay more than
$1500-2000 (and even that's stretching it, considering shipping and
taxes)
Best-case-scenario, I guess, would be some kind of price-compare
service for "good" couches (but I'm pretty sure something like that
doesn't exist). Other solutions would be: a link to stores who sell
the specific couch I mentioned in the example for under $3000, or a
link to a list of wholesale or outlet stores that deal in stylish (for
the sake of the question, Italian designer) sofas that would
sell/deliver to an individual in the USA. |
