Designer Clara Jung launched the San Francisco–based firm Banner Day Interiors in 2014 after a stint in the Peace Corps and a law career. Amid the pandemic, she is reevaluating the push-pull of client expectations and product availability.
When you’re sourcing for a project, what are the most important factors?
The client’s budget is always first. Lately, though, in light of COVID, the second is timing. Are these clients with existing furniture who are not going to call us every other day asking where their sofa is? Or are they clients moving into a huge house from a much smaller one, they’re hosting Thanksgiving and want everything immediately? Depending on timing and the client’s personality type, we have been leaning more into vintage or antique furniture because it is readily available. I think it adheres to the Bay Area philosophy of being more green, too. The one caveat is that with those kinds of dealers and vendors, exchanges and returns are much more inflexible, so it is a gamble on our end. Our contract states that the vendor’s policy applies to the client, but being a service industry, we also roll those items into our inventory—which is basically my storage shed—if the client doesn’t love it. So it’s a question of how much risk am I willing to take on with some antique pieces, and how much [it costs] if I roll it back into inventory.
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