Demand, then production

For twenty-five years I worked in an order that everyone in my trade works in. You design in winter. You guess how many. You make them all, months ahead, in a factory on the other side of the world. Then you spend the whole year trying to find the people you guessed for.

It's called production, then demand. And for a long time it worked well enough that nobody asked whether it was the right way round.

I'm asking now. Cœura runs the other way. Demand, then production. You ask for a piece, and then we make it… not the reverse. There is no warehouse. There is no pile of something waiting for someone to want it. Instead, there is a trusted bench in Bali, with a queue of names on it, and each name is a person who already said yes.

Here's what that costs, because it does cost something (and I'd rather tell you plainly, as you may want to settle in and exhale from knowing you don't need everything tomorrow).

It costs time. A piece made after you ask for it takes longer to arrive than a piece pulled off a shelf. Work begins the day you order (the smiths don't wait for anything), but making is slower than picking, and finishing has its own pace. Most pieces reach you in two to three weeks. We'll write to you along the way so you're never wondering.

It costs me the comfort of the guess. I can't stock up on what I think will sell, because I'm not thinking about what will sell. I'm thinking about what you asked for. The first time I ran the numbers on this way of working, I was frightened by them. Then I remembered how frightened I'd been, every January, running things the other way.

And it costs the sale. I won't ever mark a commissioned piece down, because a thing made for one person was never a thing to clear. That's a line most of my industry can't afford to draw. It's the one I came back to draw.

What it buys is the only thing I ever wanted from this work in the first place: that every single piece that leaves the atelier was wanted. Nothing here was made on a hunch. It was made on a yes.

Made once. Meant to keep. That's what we've been saying, or in short: Made for you.

Xx, Patti