To the trade, net, and list: how showroom pricing works

One of the first surprises for anyone new to the design showroom is that the price is often not on the sample. This is deliberate, and understanding the pricing structure explains why the to-the-trade world guards its numbers.

Traditionally, showroom goods carry a list price, the suggested retail, and the trade buys at a discount off that list. In the classic model the designer's cost is roughly half of list, an arrangement old enough that the trade still uses the word "keystone" for a straight doubling between cost and retail. The designer then either resells to the client at list, keeping the discount as their margin, or bills at their net cost plus a stated design fee. Both models are legitimate. They are just different ways of getting paid.

Net pricing is the other common structure, especially on commercial and contract lines. A net price is already the trade price with no further discount, so what you see is what the trade pays. It is quoted that way precisely because the goods are being specified into a bid, where a clean number matters more than a discount to negotiate.

The discount itself is not one fixed number. Depending on the manufacturer and the designer's volume it commonly lands somewhere between 20 and 50 percent off list, and many lines also publish a minimum advertised price, a MAP, that dealers are contractually barred from advertising below. MAP is why you will see a product with no visible price at all rather than a discounted one: showing the number publicly would breach the manufacturer's own policy.

Why keep list prices off the public sample at all? Because the channel is built around the designer as the buyer of record. If retail shoppers could read a list price on every swatch, the discount that makes the designer's business work would be visible to the end client, and the line between the designer's cost and their fee would blur. Manufacturers protect the channel by protecting the price. For the designer, the only real rule is to tell the client up front which model is in play, list or net-plus-fee, because a client who discovers the structure later reads the silence as the problem, not the markup.