One moment you're signing the mortgage papers for your new house, or rental contract, and the next you discover that you have to dig a little deeper in your bank account: You have to furnish the place. Who among us hasn't coveted a gorgeous Kastiel settee system and eyed with dismay the affordable, clunky offerings on Herzl Street, south Tel Aviv. Can't we possibly afford just one or two designer items, you wonder, for the new nest?
First of all, that's a yes, but it takes patience and resolve. You have to wait for one of the designer stores to offer a special sale, and they do from time to time.
Designer Arik Ben-Simhon insists that he doesn't sell at discount rates, and even though Kastiel's secret warehouse where he stored slightly damaged or old items has closed, the dream is not dead.
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Niso Furniture in Florentine, Tel Aviv, shows items that are considered designer goods, and are priced accordingly. But next door is a storage room containing several items that have gone out of fashion, or got scratched or scraped while on display. They can't remain on display and the vendor is pleased to sell them quietly for 70% to 80% of the original price. There are armchairs and other seats, chests of drawers, couches: Anything Niso sells may wind up in the storage space.
"We get a lot of people who badly want to buy one of our items, but not to pay much," says Leon Niso, one of the owners. "So I take them to the warehouse. They might find a white leather couch whose back got dirty, and I'm asking just NIS 10,000 to NIS 14,000 for it instead of NIS 40,000."
Bargain basements like that are hard to find, though. It's easier to try your luck at surplus outlets of luxury chains. These surplus stores generally have a range of designer goods that got there for various reasons. Sometimes a store overstocked, or bought a large amount (to lock in a cheaper rate per unit) intending in advance that some would be sold through the surplus outlet.
At Tollman's, you can find a chaise lounge for NIS 7,100 at the surplus outlet instead of the floor price of NIS 9,000.
"When an item leaves the collection, or alternatively there's a model still in the collection but there isn't much interest in it, I'll put it in the surplus outlet," explains Nir Rodman, the marketing manager of Nicoletti.
And that's how a customer gets the chance to buy a brand-name living room set for as little as half-price, sometimes.
Surplus outlets have another advantage, points out Rodman: efficiency. There are no special orders. The client likes, he buys: He can't order a different color or size.
A respectable surplus store will go to pains to point out any flaws in the item you're choosing. Usually they aren't major - a scratch on a leg, a chink in some not-terribly-obvious spot. "The dynamic of product turnover in the surplus store is at the level of weeks, for individual items. In two months, you can come back and see big changes in the selection," says Shuki Shwartz, manager of Tollman's Israel.
He adds that people can take ages to make a decision: They see a design and like it, but from there to signing the check can take months. By that time there's a chance the item will be gone - or relegated to the surplus outlet. Again, in the surplus outlet there's no negotiation over shape, the type of upholstery or drawer handles. You like, you take.
Or, you can buy straight off the floor, from display. That's usually worth 10% to 30% knocked off the price, at least if the store wants to get rid of it and move on in life. The store may even offer to deliver it to your home even if it isn't getting full price. Niso, for one, isn't prepared to sell from display that easily: he'd rather the client order from inventory and pay full price. After selling the item on the cheap he'd just have to redo his floor, he explains.
Also, if you're buying a display item, inspect it carefully before forking over good money. Look for discoloration, stains, wear and tear, scratches, dents, that sort of thing.
Lucky breaks can be had when a store is changing its collection, which usually happens in December, and in June-July. Then you may find items with 50% knocked off. Designer Haim Karandagi, for instance, was prepared to sell a three-meter deep couch for NIS 27,000 instead of NIS 42,000 in honor of a collection change, and a steel coffee table for NIS 7,500 instead of NIS 12,000. Seasonal sales can also be an opportunity for people who can't quite afford what they like, Karandagi points out.
The Habitat chain came up with another idea to help middle-income earners achieve costly furnishings: group sales. Each month the chain buys large amounts of a designer product from the international market and sells it for 20% to 30% less than the original price - for one month only. It was offering a Verner Panton chair in a range of colors for NIS 900, down from NIS 1,200. True, it's only one item a month and at a relatively minor discount to that of surplus stores, but Habitat doesn't have surplus outlets and this may be the only way to get brand-new designer furnishings at less than designer price.
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