What Can Custom Framing Do for Your Bottom Line?

September 16, 2024 , Colin Morris

What Can Custom Framing Do for Your Bottom Line?

If you don’t consider custom framing, you’re cutting out a series of decisions from your scope of work. Those decisions are now on your client’s plate instead of your own.

Not only does this result in potential anxiety for your client, but it means lost hours for you—hours that can be spent in consultation with a framer.

It’s the same kind of consultation you would have choosing furniture, it takes time, taste, and planning, and it’s as much a part of your final design as anything else in the room — without a frame plan, you’re leaving money on the table.

Add a frame plan to your design scope, upcharge your client, and then let the framer take on the work.

What can it do for your design?

Not only is there a financial benefit to integrating custom framing into your checklist but look at it from a creative perspective. By neglecting framing, you’re leaving design opportunities on the table too.

If your client is already paying for an interior designer, chances are they’re not paying to take on a share of the important decisions. They may want their own input, but generally, they’re looking for a deliverable, final product to be handed over to them.

They want you to be making the design decisions – not them – and definitely not a big-box store. Clients come to designers for unique, personalized, cutting-edge design, why would you sacrifice an opportunity to deliver? or even just to explore an often overlooked medium of interior design?

That’s what custom framing is, an opportunity.

It’s another space to exercise your creativity, to build your skill, extend your portfolio, or to strengthen your understanding of art.

Why work with a custom framer?

The best frames make the biggest changes in the most subtle ways – to go from one shade of white to another can completely alter how you see a piece.

A frame can affect perception and depth, enhance colour, direct the eye, but it’s a precise balance between complementing the work without undermining it. That balance is only possible to achieve through custom framing.

The right design concept for framing and installation is not necessarily a right and wrong, or a “how-to” that you can follow. The perfect design concept feels seamless, and that takes meticulous attention to texture, light, dimension, and atmosphere – all these things take time and, as designers and decorators, you know little things can make a big difference.

The kind of craftsmanship you want is exclusive to custom framers, you’re not going to get the same investment of time or care from somewhere that mass-produces their frames.

If you’re charging premium rates, your clients will know when it’s a cheap frame. It’s most obvious in the quality of materials – custom framers use real wood and metal, in comparison to the factory-assembled particle board you’re going to see with box-store frames.

Art may be slipping where it shouldn’t, the frame won’t hold up over time, or the design outcome may look generic. At the end of the day, you get what you pay for—and with custom framing you’re getting consultation, quality, and craftsmanship.

It doesn’t have to be outrageously expensive. Many custom framers have relationships with design firms that offer them generous discounts for larger accounts.

At the end of the day, the extra time and money you allocate into custom framing generates financial and professional reward for you. When you’re not integrating framing into your plan, you’re not finishing the job.