BENEFICIARIOS Alegatos de la Comisión y de los representantes

Manufacturers committed to making custom furniture come to their craft from essentially the same premise as that of stock manufacturers—the belief in their ability to problem solve through the art and science of furniture design and manufacture. Beyond that, there is divergence. Stock manufacturers may be driven more by the potential economic rewards of enterprise. They have ex- pended much thought and effort into creating a marketable product. Now the drive is to exploit it—to quickly get, and then perpetuate, a healthy return on that investment of energy and capital. Custom manufacturers, though they must show profits in the real world alongside their stock-manufacturer counterparts, may be driven less by practical economic considerations than by an artist’s or in- ventor’s quest: The process of creation is, in itself, a more fulfilling end than the realization of monetary gain from that creation alone. True custom manufactur- ers are caught up in a perpetual process of invention and reinvention. There are no stock lines in their catalogs. In fact, there are no catalogs in the sense of those produced by stock manufacturers, only a portfolio of past projects in which the creative process was reinitiated with little reference to the previous project, except for pervasive and time-honored principles governing the selection of ma- terials and of construction.

Advantages of Purchasing Custom Library Furniture

Flexibility and Innovation By definition, custom furniture manufacturers are free of many of the constraints that limit stock manufacturers. Their lifeblood is design flexibility and creativity, and with that comes a fascination with new and different materials options. Instead of studying to narrow material choices and production methods to an efficient few, custom manufacturers oper- ate from a broad familiarity with a vast array of materials and methods. This gives them an advantage in the domain of problem solving. Instead of having to impose a stock furniture design onto a project that resists a stock solution, the custom manufacturer comes to your furniture problem with few preconceived ideas and with the attitude of wanting to discern your unique needs. They then design furniture to answer those needs in every important particular, constrained only by the real-world limitations of material costs and dimensions, economies of production volume, and the skill level of their craftspeople—their single most valuable resource. The skill and expertise of their workforce, probably more than the sophistication of their machinery, is what sets the best custom manu- facturers apart from stock manufacturers.

Aesthetics Equally motivating as the unrestrained freedom to problem-solve is custom furniture manufacturers’ obsession with making tangible objects of in- trinsic beauty. They are as concerned with art as they are with function. They will also adhere to a strict standard of craftsmanship even if that means sacrificing a degree of price competitiveness. Their primary motivation never has been nor ever will be to come in as low bidders for the sole motivation of being able to offer the cheapest prices. The goal of the best custom manufacturers is to produce and sell value, where value is defined as the optimal convergence of quality and price. (The very important concept of quality is discussed in a later section.)

Interface with the Architectural/Design Community Custom library fur- niture manufacturers are ideally suited to fruitful collaborations with architects and designers whose mandate is to create signature designs for their clients. An excellent case in point is the recently completed Nashville Main Library, de- signed by Robert A. M. Stern of New York City. The architecture, both exterior and interior, is classical. The architect for the interior also designed the library furniture, adopting and incorporating meticulously researched motifs of classical Greek furniture into the lines of the Nashville reading tables and carrels. The custom furniture manufacturer’s responsibility and opportunity in this collabora- tion was to bring to bear the very best solutions for ergonomics and construc- tion, as well as the level of craftsmanship and finishing that the richness of the design legacy warranted. This is a lofty example and an exception, in terms of cost and scope, to most library projects, but the principles apply to any project for which the driving motivation is to create—even to create within a limited budget, which leads to an assertion you might not expect.

Value Engineering for Cost Because custom manufacturers operate from a mindset of flexibility and innovation, they can approach cost in the same way they would address your need for a custom-designed circulation desk: They can design your furniture to fall within a targeted budget figure. Value engineering is a term often misused in the construction industry. In the worst sense, it means cutting the quality out of a product in order to get the price down; in the best, it means finding ways to eliminate unnecessary costs in material and labor without sacrificing quality. Admittedly, even value engineering has its limitations. If you need an unconventional solution for one service desk or three computer tables for a small library, you want the services of a small custom manufacturer. Such firms carry a much smaller overhead burden than large custom manufacturers, and their price to you will be less. The big manufacturers may come up with so- lutions for you that are just as good, but they cannot, even by employing all their expertise and imagination, value-engineer a custom service desk at as low a dollar figure as a small shop can. Conversely, the small shop cannot, in all likeli- hood, pass on to you the economies of scale for large output that a large com- pany can, nor can they manufacture in nearly as short a time frame. This may seem too obvious to mention, but intelligent people often don’t realize that small shops do small jobs; large shops do large jobs. This, by the way, is a charac- teristic of custom manufacturers much more often than it is of stock manufactur- ers. Custom furniture manufacturers can range from large to small family-run businesses. Stock furniture manufacturers are almost always large enterprises with several million dollars in yearly sales, and nationwide, if not worldwide, distribution. Another tip: You may be as well served by going to a custom wood- work house for your circulation and service desks as to a manufacturer of strictly library furniture. Across the country are custom woodwork manufacturers who are members of the national association of U.S. woodworkers called the Archi- tectural Woodwork Institute (AWI). AWI has established quality standards that have been adopted by the nation’s woodwork and construction industries as well as by the American Institute of Architects (AIA). Among these AWI member firms are those with a particular reputation for producing fine custom woodwork, and even if many of them do not regularly manufacture library furniture, they would be capable of fabricating most of the pieces that stock manufacturers typi- cally do not provide.

Disadvantages of Custom Library Furniture

In fairness to stock manufacturers, quality stock manufacturing has a poten- tial advantage over the custom manufacturing process. Stock manufacturers get to rework and refine their furniture designs before they go on the market; cus- tom manufacturers get only one shot. This means, in practical terms, that the architect or designer who conceives your furniture on paper must be knowledge- able in the appropriate use of materials and must be a good furniture engineer— aware of the stresses on the parts of a chair or table and versed in the ergonomics of the human body, not just a wonderful and creative aesthetician. If that is not

completely the case, you still have a safety net: the expert custom manufacturer. The expert custom furniture maker thrives on taking a good aesthetic (but not wholly practical) design and making it structurally and ergonomically sound while preserving the architect’s design intent—and making it affordable. One obscure but very competent library furniture maker I know graduated second in his class from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, a col- lege long revered as a mecca for the nation’s best and brightest in the field of in- terior, industrial, retail, and furniture design. This man has gone on to design one-of-a-kind treasures, from the 50-foot-high by 80-foot-long organ case (the woodwork that encloses the organ pipes) for one of the largest performing arts halls in the world, to the classically beautiful walnut boxes that housed each Olympic medal awarded in the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. In addition, his skills as a library furniture designer and craftsman make him an invaluable re- source to any gifted but practically inexperienced design professional.

I can think of no real disadvantages of the quality custom solution except in the case in which price has to be the controlling factor in the purchase decision. Time and again, it has been borne out that purchase decisions based on price alone are poor decisions, and that the low-price purchase must, as often as not, be replaced at a higher cost than that of the original purchase, resulting in a net cost of more than double the original expenditure. You might want to argue that the stock manufacturer has the advantage over the custom manufacturer in the event of the need for a reorder or a replacement order. That sounds reasonable until you understand that stock manufacturers do not, as a rule, keep large in- ventories of their stock lines. There is no more incentive for them to maintain large inventories of furniture in their warehouses waiting to be sold on specula- tion than there is for custom manufacturers to do so. Stock and custom manu- facturers alike fabricate on an order-by-order basis.