E lias worked in a basement shop in Mong Kok and he spent his days fixing watches that other people had ruined. He was a man of small movements and thick glasses and he never started a job by talking about the history of horology or the beauty of a sweeping second hand. People would come down the narrow stairs and they would put a broken Rolex or a cheap Seiko on his velvet mat and they would start to tell a story about a guy in a mall who had scratched the movement or a cousin who had tried to oil the gears with salad oil.
Elias would listen and he would nod and he would wait for the anger to run out of them. He knew that he was not just fixing a spring and he was fixing the fact that someone had lied to them before. He never promised them a miracle and he only promised them that he would do the work he said he would do and he would still be there when they came back next Tuesday.
The Fog of the City
I spent my morning today in a similar way and I had my phone on mute because I was tasting water samples from a limestone spring and I missed ten calls in a row. When I finally looked at the screen I felt a familiar sink in my stomach and I knew those ten calls were not about style or the color of a wood grain.
They were calls from people who were checking to see if I still existed and they were calls born from a deep and heavy fear that the person they gave their money to had walked into the fog of the city and would never come back. This is the shadow that hangs over every showroom in Hong Kong and we all pretend it is not there but it sits in the chair next to every new client.
Client Motivation
Prevalence in the Showroom
The “Silent Client”: Seven out of ten visitors are managing the fear of a contractor’s disappearance.
A man came into the Tsuen Wan showroom last Saturday and he looked like he had not slept for a week. He sat down and he put a heavy folder on the table and I saw the name of another company on the cover. He did not ask about the grade of the plywood and he did not ask about the soft close hinges on the wardrobes.
“The last company took our money and they stopped answering the phone and they left my kitchen with no doors and a hole where the sink should be.”
– The Client from Tsuen Wan
He had these beautiful 3D renders in his folder and they showed a home that looked like a temple of light and gold but his reality was a dusty flat with wires hanging from the ceiling and a wife who was crying in the car.
Selling the After Photo
The interior design industry is obsessed with selling the after photo and we fill our websites with pictures of perfect sunsets hitting perfect cushions and we talk about the soul of the space. But half the people who walk through my door are not looking for a soul and they are looking for a floor that actually gets laid down.
They have been failed by the other half of the industry and they are coming to me not because I am a genius of light but because they hope I am not a thief. There is a total mismatch between how we talk to the world and how the world feels when it talks to us. We offer them diamonds and they just want to know if the box is empty.
Historical Context: Railway Mania
In the middle of the nineteenth century there was a time in England called the and it was a frenzy of hope and greed. Men like George Hudson promised that iron tracks would reach every village and they took money from widows and shopkeepers and they printed beautiful maps of lines that would never be built.
People were not buying a ticket to London and they were buying the idea of a future that moved faster than a horse. When the bubble burst thousands of people were left with nothing but pieces of paper and a deep hatred for anyone who carried a surveyor’s map. The industry of building things has always been haunted by the ghost of the man who promised too much and ran away with the gold.
A Completion Guarantee
When a customer comes in with that look in their eye I have to stop being a designer and I have to start being a steady hand. I have to explain that we own our own factory and we have been making furniture for and we use E0 plywood because it is safe but mostly I have to show them that we have a completion guarantee.
This is not a sexy thing to talk about and it does not look good in a glossy magazine but it is the only thing that matters to a man who has been sleeping on a mattress in a construction zone for . He needs to know that the risk is on us and he needs to know that if the job is not finished it is our problem and not his.
Every step is handled by our own team instead of being tossed to a stranger in a van. This is the only way to stop the cycle of blame that ruins so many homes. Usually a designer blames the carpenter and the carpenter blames the installer and the owner is left standing in the middle of a mess with nobody to yell at. We make sure there is only one person to talk to and that person is still there when the sun goes down.
The Weight of Memory
I think about the ten missed calls on my phone and I realize that trust is a very thin thing and it takes years to grow and only a second to snap. Every time a contractor disappears it makes my job harder because I have to spend the first three meetings earning back the trust that someone else stole.
We are not just competing against other designers and we are competing against the memory of every bad experience our customers have ever had. It is a heavy way to work but it is the only honest way to do it in a city where every square foot is a battle.
The man in Tsuen Wan eventually closed his folder and he took a deep breath and he looked at our 3D preview of his new living room. He did not care about the aesthetics of the TV cabinet and he only cared that the dimensions were right and that the timeline was real.
He asked me three times if I was sure we would be there on the Monday of the installation. I told him we would be there and I gave him my direct number and I told him to call me if he felt the fear coming back. We are in the business of making homes but more than that we are in the business of keeping our word in a world that treats words like they are free.
“I told him we would be there and I gave him my direct number and I told him to call me if he felt the fear coming back.”
The Unfinished Corner
The industry needs to stop pretending that everyone is arriving fresh and happy. We need to acknowledge that our customers are often wounded and they are looking for safety more than they are looking for style. If we do not fix the way we treat the people who have been failed then we are just part of the same machine that broke them.
I went back to my water samples and I felt the cold glass in my hand and I decided to call every single one of those ten numbers back before I did anything else today. They needed to hear a voice and they needed to know that someone was on the other end of the line.
The ghost of the missing carpenter sits in the empty corner of the unfinished room.
We build things to last and that includes the relationship with the person who is paying for the wood. It is not enough to have a factory or a showroom or a fancy website. You have to have the guts to stand behind the work until the last screw is turned and the last bit of dust is swept away.
Standing behind the work until the last screw is turned and the last bit of dust is swept away.
That is what a 100% completion guarantee really means and it means the customer can finally close their eyes and sleep without wondering if the door will open to an empty site tomorrow morning. It is a simple promise but in this city it is the most valuable thing we have to sell.
I hope the man from Tsuen Wan finds some peace in his new kitchen and I hope he forgets the name of the company that failed him. I want him to look at his cabinets and see a job well done instead of seeing the battle he had to fight to get them.
We are not just fitting boards to walls and we are fitting a sense of order back into a life that was pushed into chaos by a contractor who did not care. That is the real work and the rest is just sawdust and glue.