Like any relationship, it’s establishing a good foundation to build from.
When people talk about collaboration, we so naturally go to the architects, the upholsterers, the specialist painters, but the most important collaboration is with the client because without their collaboration what do you do? When they arrive at the end and they feel like it’s their house, like they’re walking into their own taste and lifestyle rather than it being a Rita Konig house and I’ve put my five things that we always do—for some clients and designers, that’s the experience and that’s what everybody wants. But that’s what I find very exciting: the discipline to work through these things and create beautiful, sophisticated, and comfortable interiors for clients.
How do you manage client fatigue?
One of the things that I do and try to instill in my team is to always put yourself in the client’s shoes. It doesn’t happen often, but things do go wrong. Something arrives broken or in the wrong color. I feel the less a client can be subjected to that and the more it’s not their problem, the better—it reduces the areas for fatigue. We are in the service industry—It’s all client experience. I would want somebody to say to me, “This will be taken care of. You will not be billed for this.”
Budgets can also rear fatigue. Any tips for stopping it before it starts?
You have to put every little thing in your budget to begin with. I never want to say to somebody, “That’s not in your budget.” It’s so annoying, and again, that’s just putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes. Whether you’re spending $2 or $2.5 million, it’s all huge money. It’s all a frog to swallow when you get to the bill, so tell them $2.5 million—not $2 million—so that every time you’re doing something you say, ‘Yes, it’s in the budget.’ If somebody is always telling you that’s not in your budget you just perpetually feel like you’re getting the cheapest version. In every room, we build in a sum for everything—lighting, china, glass, everything. That is where the fatigue comes from. It’s really annoying to be told that you can’t afford lights. It shouldn’t be an extra.
How do you keep in touch with clients longterm?
There’s a reality that comes that year following installation. The client moves in and realizes that actually this doesn’t work as well as they thought, or they need to change that, or add a couple of extra things here. That’s another area where you can get client fatigue—they move in, you move on to the next job, there are always things that will go wrong. So you have to always make sure that there is space in your team for that aftercare because you can deliver the most beautiful thing and everybody’s delighted, but it can sour quickly when you’re not tying up those loose ends in the six to 12 months following.
This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.
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