Fed up with the enshittification of everything? So are we – especially in the furniture industry. So we’re making a stand against overpriced, plastic-filled sofas and rotten service.
The time has come for the great sofa de-schittication!
The enshittification of the sofa industry
There is a useful word for what has been happening to the world: enshittification.
Enshittification is the search engine that used to help you find things, but now serves you a banquet of ads, sponsored answers and AI-generated slop before grudgingly allowing you near the information you actually wanted. It is the app that worked beautifully until someone realised it could be made more profitable by making it more annoying.
Basically, it's a commercial strategy of giving something away to sucker you in, and then making it exactly as bad as they can get away with before you stop buying - the minimum viable product for a profit.
It’s not just tech, either. Other particularly egregious examples include:
AI robots doing customer service – and everything in their power to stop you speaking to a human being
Hotel staff replaced by an iPad and some QR codes
T-shirts thinner than paper and ‘wool-blend’ meaning 7% wool and 93%... other stuff
Chocolate bars getting smaller, and noticeably less chocolatey
Rohan has a particular theory about Tabasco sauce, which he swears has been watered down to the point where he has to use twice as many drops to achieve the desired level of pain.
But if you want a near-perfect example of enshittification, look no further than the modern sofa industry.
In the showroom or brochure, everything looks lovely. But look under the bonnet and it’s another story.
For years, the sofa industry has been finding ways to put less and less into the thing you actually buy. Out have gone the traditional materials, the skilled making methods and the things that make a sofa last.
In have come petrochemical foam, dacron, chemical treatments and cheap zig-zag springs. ‘Design’ means making a sofa that looks like the real deal on the outside, but it’s just the outline of a good sofa: inside is a load of cheap rubbish, destined for landfill or the incinerator. Marketing has replaced making.
The enshittified modern sofa has become a piece of commercial calculation: giving the customer the minimum acceptable level of quality and customer care that they can get away with. The sofa just needs to look good enough to be sold and last long enough to survive the warranty period.
De-schittification starts with Schplendid
Schplendid exists because it doesn’t need to be this way.
We are not interested in making the minimum viable sofa. We are interested in making a ridiculously good one – and then working out how to sell it at a sane price.
So we do the exact opposite of the enshittified sofa industry. We put in more, more, more!
Real hardwood frames, guaranteed for life, and proper traditional joinery methods
We spend much less money on the things that don’t matter – grand showrooms, salespeople, marketing nonsense – so we can spend every possible penny on the thing that matters: the sofa.
The de-schittification of the furniture industry starts here!
(Actually, maybe what we need is a campaign… We could call it the "Campaign for Real Upholstery". Watch this space….)
De-schittification starts here
Fed up with the enshittification of everything? So are we – especially in the furniture industry. So we’re making a stand against overpriced, plastic-filled sofas and rotten service.
The time has come for the great sofa de-schittication!
The enshittification of the sofa industry
There is a useful word for what has been happening to the world: enshittification.
Enshittification is the search engine that used to help you find things, but now serves you a banquet of ads, sponsored answers and AI-generated slop before grudgingly allowing you near the information you actually wanted. It is the app that worked beautifully until someone realised it could be made more profitable by making it more annoying.
Basically, it's a commercial strategy of giving something away to sucker you in, and then making it exactly as bad as they can get away with before you stop buying - the minimum viable product for a profit.
It’s not just tech, either. Other particularly egregious examples include:
AI robots doing customer service – and everything in their power to stop you speaking to a human being
Hotel staff replaced by an iPad and some QR codes
T-shirts thinner than paper and ‘wool-blend’ meaning 7% wool and 93%... other stuff
Chocolate bars getting smaller, and noticeably less chocolatey
Rohan has a particular theory about Tabasco sauce, which he swears has been watered down to the point where he has to use twice as many drops to achieve the desired level of pain.
But if you want a near-perfect example of enshittification, look no further than the modern sofa industry.
In the showroom or brochure, everything looks lovely. But look under the bonnet and it’s another story.
For years, the sofa industry has been finding ways to put less and less into the thing you actually buy. Out have gone the traditional materials, the skilled making methods and the things that make a sofa last.
In have come petrochemical foam, dacron, chemical treatments and cheap zig-zag springs. ‘Design’ means making a sofa that looks like the real deal on the outside, but it’s just the outline of a good sofa: inside is a load of cheap rubbish, destined for landfill or the incinerator. Marketing has replaced making.
The enshittified modern sofa has become a piece of commercial calculation: giving the customer the minimum acceptable level of quality and customer care that they can get away with. The sofa just needs to look good enough to be sold and last long enough to survive the warranty period.
De-schittification starts with Schplendid
Schplendid exists because it doesn’t need to be this way.
We are not interested in making the minimum viable sofa. We are interested in making a ridiculously good one – and then working out how to sell it at a sane price.
So we do the exact opposite of the enshittified sofa industry. We put in more, more, more!
Real hardwood frames, guaranteed for life, and proper traditional joinery methods
Eight-way hand-tied coil springs instead of cheap zig-zag springs
Coconut husk, wool, and luxurious goose down instead of plastic fluff and petrochemical foam
Beautiful Italian linen and cotton velvet fabrics
No fake discounts, no “was £5,000, now £2,999” retail theatre - just the right price with no inflated mark-ups on the best ingredients
Human beings answering the phone
Free delivery, free returns, and 50 days to decide whether your new sofa is The One
We spend much less money on the things that don’t matter – grand showrooms, salespeople, marketing nonsense – so we can spend every possible penny on the thing that matters: the sofa.
The de-schittification of the furniture industry starts here!
(Actually, maybe what we need is a campaign… We could call it the "Campaign for Real Upholstery". Watch this space….)
See also:
Ten Things the Sofa Industry Would Rather You Didn’t Think About