The price of an idea

European wall shelving carries a certain authority. Vitsœ's 606 — conceived by Dieter Rams in 1960 and still in production — is a serious object. Well-made, well-considered, and priced accordingly. A single configured column crosses a thousand dollars before you have put anything on it.

The price is not irrational. It reflects precision manufacturing, considered design, and in Vitsœ's case, a company philosophy built around longevity. You are paying, in part, for an idea.

The question worth asking is what that idea actually costs to make.
Less than the import model suggests, I think. The gap between manufacturing cost and retail price in European shelving sold in America is not entirely explained by quality. Some of it is freight. Some is currency. Some is the margin structure of a distribution chain that runs from a factory in Germany or Denmark through a showroom in New York to a customer who was never going to walk in anyway.

These are real costs. They are also costs that have nothing to do with whether the shelf holds your books.

Desh— was built around the same underlying logic as the European systems we admire. Modular, wall-mounted, reconfigurable without re-drilling, expandable without replacement. Steel chosen for what steel does — thin sections that carry more than they appear to, tolerances that stay consistent across climates, powder coat that holds colour and takes abuse quietly. A hangtrack designed specifically for American stud construction, which the European systems were not.

What we did not replicate was the pricing model.

We are based in Atlanta. There is no showroom, no distributor margin. The result is a system that performs where it should and costs what it should — not what the mythology of European design has historically allowed manufacturers to charge.

This is not an argument against Vitsœ. They are making something genuine. It is an argument that the price premium attached to that category of object is partly structural and partly cultural, and that the cultural portion, at least, is negotiable.

We think good shelving should be accessible without being compromised. We are still working out whether we have got that balance right. But that is the ambition.

–Moria Deshpande