Scroll through KBB LinkedIn on any given week and you’ll find it: another post, another comment thread, another round of the same conversation. Should we be charging for design?

I read the analysis in the May issue of kbbreview on the different models most retailers adopt when they do charge with great interest.

But the question of whether you should or shouldn’t always carries an undertone. It’s rarely framed as a personal commercial decision. It’s framed as a movement, a sector-wide call for independents to fall into line, charge fees, and stop “giving away” expertise. The implication is that any retailer not charging is undermining the rest of us.

I completely understand why this conversation exists. The pain behind it is real. Customers tyre-kick, designs get shopped around to cheaper fitters, and hours of skilled work disappear into projects that never close. If you’ve been in this industry more than a couple of years, you’ve felt it.

But the answer being pushed, that we should all charge, simply doesn’t hold up commercially. And the longer we keep treating this as a binary moral question, the more we miss what’s actually going on.

Notice who’s missing from the debate. Almost every post about charging for design is framed around the retailer’s position: our time, our expertise, our value, our protection. Almost none of them start with the customer.

That’s the first problem. The customer doesn’t care what other retailers in the sector have decided to do. They care whether the experience they’re buying, the design, the relationship, the showroom, the project management, the fit, is worth the money. If charging a design fee feels right for the value you deliver, the customer will pay it. If it doesn’t, they won’t.

This is positioning, not principle. And positioning has to be earned at the customer level, not legislated at the industry level.

Testing

Here’s the thing that always strikes me about the “we should all charge” framing: nothing is stopping anyone. If you believe charging for design is the right model for your business, do it. Test it. Refine the offer. Build the experience around it.

But the moment your model only works if every other independent in the country also adopts it, you’ve identified the problem. That’s not a positioning strategy. It’s an attempt to remove competition by consensus. It’s a tell that the offer hasn’t been built strongly enough to stand on its own.

The independents who charge well, and there are some excellent ones, don’t need everyone else to follow suit. Their pricing is backed by a confident, differentiated experience that justifies it.

A few years ago, we were regularly competing in our region against an interior designer who also sold kitchens and bathrooms. Paid design from the outset. Premium positioning. The full treatment. But we don’t charge for design. 

Last year, that business closed. I’m not telling that story to celebrate. The local context matters. Our region in West Wales isn’t dense with the high-affluence buyers a paid-design model needs to feed it. That’s part of the picture. But it’s not all of it.

The bigger lesson is that free design, when the design itself is genuinely strong, is a remarkable lead generation engine. It lowers the barrier for a customer to start a conversation with you. It puts you in the room early. It lets the relationship, the actual driver of high-ticket purchase decisions, start forming before money has changed hands.

For a business in the right segment of the market, with the right capability behind it, free design isn’t a giveaway. It’s how you get to the table and start the conversation.

The independent KBB sector covers a huge spectrum. Local family retailers serving regional markets. Premium studios chasing £100k-plus projects. Volume operators competing on speed and price. Designer-led businesses where the creative work is the product. Hybrid models doing all of the above.

That diversity is one of the genuine strengths of the independent sector. It’s why customers across very different budgets, taste levels, and project ambitions can still find a retailer that fits them. It’s also why no single commercial model, paid design, free design, hybrid, deposit-based, or anything else, is going to be right for everyone.

The push for industry-wide consensus on charging quietly assumes a homogeneity that isn’t there and shouldn’t be there. What works for a London studio targeting £80k kitchens isn’t necessarily right for a regional independent winning £25k projects on relationship and reputation. Both are doing good work. Both have viable businesses. Neither needs the other to validate their model.

Marketing

There are genuinely interesting commercial questions in this sector right now. How independents differentiate against the larger groups. How to qualify leads earlier. How to build customer experiences that justify premium pricing. How to use marketing to attract the right buyers in the first place, so you spend less time designing for people who were never going to buy in the first place

Those conversations move the industry forward. The endless “should we all charge” debate doesn’t.

Charge for design if it fits your positioning, your market, and your customer. Don’t charge if it doesn’t. Stop waiting for the rest of the sector to agree with you before you back your own commercial judgement, and stop assuming everyone else needs to make the same call you did.

The customer will tell you whether you’ve got the model right. They always do.