First, some bad news: The shipping issues plaguing the industry aren’t going anywhere. The situation has become so dire that some designers have even launched their own in-house receiving businesses, while at least one industry brand is launching a new initiative that aims to bring manufacturers and shipping companies into better alignment.

But what can a designer do today to protect their firm from the disruptions caused by damages and delays? This week, BOH dives into four ways to weather supply chain snarls.

Find a Showroom That’s Got Your Back
For designers, purchasing through the right middleman can open the door to a new set of solutions. A showroom operator with deep ties to their vendors may have greater leverage when it comes time to negotiate a new course of action for a damaged item. Plus, with years of experience, they may be able to steer you away from receivers with poor track records.

Ken Berry, who has owned the AmericanEye showroom in the Washington Design Center for more than two decades, views his role not only as handling procurement on behalf of design firms, but also helping designers navigate issues that arise in the supply chain. Part of that work is prevention—namely, blacklisting shipping companies that have posed repeated problems. When it comes to damages, Berry has been working on educating both camps, instructing his vendors to ensure that quality control is addressed at the factory, and explaining to his designer clients best practices for interacting with receivers. “We have our boilerplate sales agreement, but I added an additional page about two years ago,” he says. “For a design firm, it’s sort of like, ‘This is what you should be expecting from your receiving warehouse: They should receive your goods, they should make sure that the packaging is OK, they should refuse shipments if the carton’s torn to shreds.’”

When orders do go sideways, Berry plays an active role in making things right. One of his clients ordered a leather ottoman that shipped last August to a receiving warehouse in New England—where it stayed until Memorial Day of this year thanks to construction delays. When the item was finally unpacked at the client’s home, the design team discovered that the shipper’s packing material had peeled off the ottoman’s top layer of leather.

“The immediate phone call [from the designer] was to the showroom, and we were like, ‘That’s awful. Give it back to your warehouse. Tell them don’t leave it in the house,’” says Berry. “[The designer replied,] ‘Oh, well, they’ve already gone.’ So your client is now looking at this destroyed leather ottoman that she paid a chunk of money for and is very unhappy with it.”

He was ultimately able to leverage long-term relationships with the vendors and shipping company to come up with a joint solution: a three-way split, in which the warehouse picked up the piece and redelivered it at their expense, and the designer and showroom split the cost of repairs. For Berry, there’s an added incentive to helping showroom clients navigate ordering issues: “These are clients that we’ve had in the showroom for decades—I mean, we’re [seeing] the second generation of designers in the showroom,” he says. “I look at it as, it’s a little pain now, but big picture, we’ve resolved a problem for the design firm, and they hopefully will recognize that and come back to us.”

Work With a Design-Specific Receiver
While some designers have opened their own receiving businesses, most won’t. Luckily, there’s some middle ground: shipping and receiving companies that specialize in design goods. Though not quite as common as general receivers, there is a growing market for these specialists.

One such company is Livraison Express LA, which provides shipping services for designers and design brands. The company was started by Los Angeles–based husband-and-wife design industry veterans Baptiste and Rachel Schembri in 2019 as a shipping service geared specifically toward the Round Top Antiques Fair, and has since grown to encompass freight services of all kinds for designers across the country. Their time on both sides of the shipping process has given them insights into what a proper design supply chain should—and shouldn’t—look like.

“You have to have a staff that’s been doing it a while, that understands the extra level of care that all of these items have to go through,” says Rachel Schembri. “If you have a staff that is looking at these items as if they’re Ikea furniture, things could get damaged because of carelessness or double checks not being done often, so that things get misrouted, which causes delays.”

The issues that originate with warehouses, she says, are often a case of “overpromising and underdelivering.” Some promise designers to have their items delivered by a certain date, only to realize that the shipment isn’t enough to fill a truck—and with rising fuel prices, it’s less economical for everyone to send out a half-empty load, Instead, they wait until other orders come in, which means timelines start extending.

It’s a scenario that creates more opportunities for damages and delays amid frequent inventory reshuffling inside the warehouse. “For these shippers that are not honoring their ETAs and the stuff is sitting longer—when things are in a warehouse, they’re moving all the time, and that’s when damage happens,” she says.

To solve that issue, Livraison has dedicated racks in its warehouse for each client. Items aren’t moved unless they’re entering or leaving the facility. More broadly, the company allows clients to track their shipments on a mobile app, through which they can communicate with vendors and Livraison about the status of their item. From the beginning, the business has been structured around reducing the risks and uncertainty associated with getting a piece from vendor to designer.

“It’s a lot of luck that happens with these designers and their dream—that picture they have [in their head] of what they’re building for this client,” she says. “Our job as shippers is very specific. We don’t need to buy the stuff. We don’t need to think of where to put it. We don’t need to do any of that—we just need to keep it not damaged.”

Consider Your Options Before Returning a Product
It’s no secret that damages are becoming more common. Coco to the Trade, a purchasing and procurement firm for interior designers, has seen claims fluctuate over its nine years in business, but over the last month alone, they’ve nearly doubled. However, that doesn’t mean that returns—and the costly, lengthy process they necessitate—need to double as well.

“When items come in damaged, often designers don’t understand the difference between damage and imperfection,” says Lori Ramundo, the firm’s claims specialist. “Very often when I get a claim sent in, it will say ‘damaged,’ and I will look at it and I will see that this is going to take a paintbrush and about three seconds worth of black paint to touch up.”

In those cases, she explains, a designer likely has better avenues of recourse than a traditional damage claim and replacement, which often costs additional time and money, as vendors rarely pay the receiving and inspection fee for a make-up item. Designers can ask their receiver for a discount to keep the item as is and then find their own repairperson for a touch-up; they can also ask their receiver for a repair quote, which is then sent to the vendor for approval (Ramundo says this is what happens in the majority of such cases). If the vendor does not approve, they might instead send either a replacement, or dispatch their own repair technician.

“When you talk about storage fees and re-receiving and having to pay that again, I often say to designers, ‘You might’ve been with this receiver long enough that you might ask if they could give you a courtesy and split this with you’—and a lot of them do,” says Ramundo.

When establishing contracts with receivers, she also recommends that designers outline that they require their warehouse partners to make a notation on the bill of lading (which is issued by a carrier to create a receipt of transferred goods, a contract for transport and a document of ownership) immediately upon receiving items, identifying any damages. That way, if a designer later files a claim, they have additional documentation to make their case to vendors.

Even if a receiver doesn’t have time to unbox and inspect immediately upon receiving a shipment—or if the freight carrier doesn’t wait for that process to unfold before departing—Ramundo suggests instructing receivers to note: “Driver would not wait,” so it’s on record. “These things come back to eventually bite us—and bite the designer—if their receivers are not making these notations,” she says.

Develop a Supportive Design Network
When it comes to shipping and receiving, Honolulu-based designer Shaolin Low has to be particularly careful about how she handles inbound items—because once they reach her, Hawaii’s remoteness makes it that much more difficult to send them back.

“Everything goes to California, it sits in a warehouse there for maybe a week or two until we want to sail it, and then it sails over to Oahu and it takes a week to get there—and then if [the project] is on another island, it’s going to take another week to get there,” she says. “It might arrive in California, but sometimes we don’t get our hands on it for like a month.”

In response, Low has devised a multipart troubleshooting process for handling damaged items that leans on a number of different lines of defense—including her network of tradespeople and trusted vendors—before sending something back.

The first involves filing an insurance claim with her freight forwarder. Typically, this only applies to items that have yet to be unboxed, but where the package itself appears to be damaged. Low’s forwarder will pay up to $2,500—not enough to cover big-ticket items, but often sufficient to recoup the shipping charges associated with ordering a replacement.

To back up that claim in the first place, she ensures that someone on her team—typically a design assistant or junior designer—is available in person to take videos of the item coming off the truck (“Sometimes you can tell it’s damaged just by the way they stacked it or the way it’s on the pallet,” she says), along with photos of the truck’s license plate, a 360-degree video of the box itself, and close-up shots of specific punctures or anomalies. All of those details are then written on the bill of lading, which the driver is asked to sign off on.

“Then the company knows, ‘OK, these boxes were damaged,’ and we take that and file the form with all the photos and the [bill of lading] that the driver wrote,” she says.

Then there are cases where an item is damaged but repairable. In those instances, Low has found that vendors will often pay for the designer to find someone local to repair the item—and for that job, the designer taps her own circle of makers and craftspeople.

“It’s the same people who are building us stuff, depending on what it is—it’s our mill worker, it’s our upholstery person, it’s our seamstress,” she says. “These are people we’re working with all the time, so it’s not like we’re just calling them for repairs, which is also really nice because they know us and they know the type of work we do, what we prefer and how we like things.”

Those partnerships can even offer an opportunity to improve upon a piece in a way that best fits a given project. For items that come in with an uneven wood finish, for example, Low has enlisted the help of a local woodworker to sand the piece down to match the desired texture. She also occasionally finds a silver lining in the need for repair. “Maybe we were OK with the whitewash, but we actually prefer a clear stain,” she says. “Sometimes it’s an opportunity to improve the item or make it more custom.”

In other cases, vendors may send a replacement piece for easy fixes (like the legs on a sofa or nightstand). For larger replacement parts, however, she sometimes works with vendors to come up with creative solutions. “One time I got this kitchen island [with] a stone top, and it came in shattered. The vendor was like, ‘We won’t send you another one because we don’t want to break up the product, but we will give you money to buy and fabricate a remnant piece,’” she says. “I went to a local fabricator, found a remnant piece that was really similar, got it approved by the client and had it fabricated locally—and the vendor paid for all of that.”

With a particularly far-flung homebase, Low has been forced to get creative with her shipping solutions. Still, she stresses that coming up with the fixes isn’t the most important part—it’s developing relationships with vendors and members of your network who are willing to join in on those fixes. That’s a process that begins before an item arrives damaged or delayed, and one that must be tended to long after.

“If you know that you’re holding everyone to the same standard, it’s a really good starting point—so that you call, people pick up, and go above and beyond, because they’re like, ‘This girl’s going to pay me on time, she’s not going to nickel-and-dime me, and then when there’s something wrong, we’re going to find a reasonable solution together.”