In 1993 the bank rang Mark Adams. A German furniture company he bought from was about three weeks from closing.
He did not own it. He was its biggest customer.
Adams had first come across its shelving eight years earlier, in a London design shop called Reflex. On the floor was a system designed in 1960 by Dieter Rams, the designer behind Braun’s products and made by a small German firm called Vitsœ, run by its Danish founder, Niels Vitsœ. Adams was in his mid-twenties and had a degree in biology. In 1986 he flew to Frankfurt, met Niels Vitsœ and set up a company to sell the shelves in Britain. A year later he was making them there too.
Niels Vitsœ was turning eighty and had nobody to hand the business to. The bank and the family asked Adams to help. He remortgaged his house and took the company on, then found it was in a worse state than he had been told. He spent two years in Germany trying to save it before closing the German operation and moving what was left to Britain. By 1995 the company was based in London. “We lost everything,” he told Monocle. “And we gradually rebuilt it absolutely from zero.”
That is the rescue. The more useful part is what he decided once he had it.
Vitsœ does not hold sales. No seasonal sale, no Black Friday, no lower price for the customer who pushes. In November 2015, while the high street marked everything down, it closed its London and New York shops for the day. Adams gave the reason in an interview in 2020, and it is the plainest version of the argument I have read: “We don’t discount. Because the person who didn’t ask for a discount is subsidising the person who did ask for a discount.”
Read that twice if you sell your own time.
Every discount you give quietly is paid for by the clients who did not ask. They are the ones who trusted your price and they are usually your best customers. The discount does not stay quiet either. It teaches the person who got it that your price was an opening position. It teaches you that your price was never quite your price.
Last week I wrote that a value you have never paid for is only a preference. This is what a value looks like when a company has paid for it.
The second decision is harder to copy and worth more. In 2013 Vitsœ needed to borrow money for the first time, to build a factory. Adams did not go to venture capital. He told Monocle that bringing in people whose interest is just financial is almost always the beginning of the end. So Vitsœ issued a bond to its own customers and suppliers: a minimum of five thousand pounds, for at least five years, at 6.06 per cent a year, a nod to the 606 shelf. The Business Magazine later reported that the money was raised in six weeks. The factory opened in Royal Leamington Spa in 2017.
I want to be careful not to make this tidier than it is. Vitsœ is private. Its accounts show what it earned, not what discounting would have earned it, so I cannot prove that holding its price made it richer. It has grown slowly. It sells a shelving system that has barely changed in sixty years from one factory to customers in more than ninety countries. A business built this way gives up speed and its stated aim is to persuade people to buy less furniture and keep it longer. That is the trade and Adams made it on purpose.
What the record does show is this. A price that never moves is a promise. Every customer gets the same deal whether they bargained or not, which means nobody has to bargain. The conversation becomes about whether the thing is right for them, not whether a better deal is coming next month. And when the company needed money, the people who had trusted the price were the people who lent it.
For anyone selling their own work, that last part is the one to sit with. The clients who pay full price without an argument are not the easy ones you can take for granted. They are the ones who would back you if you asked.
Who paid for the last discount you gave?
Field Note
A price that moves for whoever pushes is not a price. It is an opening position.
Try This
Look at what you charged your last ten clients for the same kind of work.
Write down the highest price and the lowest. Then write down why they differ.
If the reason is that one of them asked, write down the sentence you will say next time, before anyone asks.