Why It’s Worth Buying an Expensive Sofa – and How Buying a Cheap Sofa Ends Up Costing You More Money Than You Expect

Hello, and welcome to our new Savvy Sofa Shopping series on the WB Furniture Blog! Today we’ll be talking about a subject very dear to us – saving money on sofas. Specifically, whether it’s worthwhile spending more money to get a higher quality sofa. We’ll also reveal some sneaky truths about buying cheap sofas, and how they can sometimes end up costing you more money than an expensive sofa. But first, the big question:

Why are sofas so expensive?

Before we can answer this question, we need to clarify what is meant by expensive. Sofas come in all kinds of price points, and one person’s “expensive” can be another person’s bargain of the week!

For our purposes, there are three reasons why people may think a sofa is expensive, the first and most obvious being because the sofa in question costs a ridiculously large amount of money. Once you get into the realm of hand built hardwood frames, horsehair fillings and silk covers you can find yourself looking at prices over £10,000 for a single sofa. Most people will agree that’s expensive, even the people paying those kinds of prices. Often those sofas are expensive because of the brand name or the designer – did you know that Gucci make sofas for example? Others are specialised products for particular purposes, like a sound-proofed sofa booth for use in an open-plan corporate office, or contract furnishing which is designed to last for decades. For most of us however, a £10,000 sofa is very far out of our usual experience.

But for now, let’s talk more about “ordinary” expensive sofas. These are sofas from brands like G Plan, Parker Knoll, Italia Living, Polo Divani, New Trend Concepts, and certain higher end retailers. These sofas can cost more than £3000 for a three seater settee, certainly not cheap by any means. Despite the expense they’re still very popular, and for very good reasons – the quality of the sofa itself is very high. These sofas are expensive because of the way they are made, the amount of work and human effort that goes into building them, and the cost of the high quality materials that they are made of.

Starting from the inside out, the first thing affecting the price is the frame. Sofa frames can be made of all kinds of materials, from inexpensive pine to high end beech hardwood. Most good quality sofas are built from a mix of materials including solid hardwood, and marine ply or engineered board. Cheap sofas on the other hand may make use of softwoods like pine, hardboard and even on occasion cardboard! The type of structure used to support the cushions will vary, with cheaper sofas utilising just elastic webbing or even a solid board base. Higher quality sofas will use springs, typically serpentine springs which are designed to flex and will last a very long time. Encapsulated coil springs are popular with several Italian sofa manufacturers, using a combination of traditional engineering and modern design to provide targeted comfort inside the seat cushions. With the main spring support being within the seat cushions themselves, sofas with coil springs have additional support underneath from thick woven webbing or occasionally additional serpentine springs. At the upper end you can encounter more complex spring systems such as fishmouth springs along the front of the sofa seat, or a mesh sprung arrangement.

The fillings of the sofa also make a big difference to the price, and they affect both how long your sofa will last, and how comfortable it will feel to sit on. There are many, many different types of foam, for example, but they’re not all created equally. A thin slab of hard foam may start off life feeling comfortably firm, but when it fails it will fail completely, becoming soft and unsupportive, and in some cases even crumbling! In contrast, a high quality high density foam will continue to loom and feel more or less the same for many years of use. Higher quality sofas often make use of multiple different filling materials, from different foam densities to Dacron fibre fill for the back cushions, feather fillings for accent cushions, and even fibre topped foam for the seats.

While the frame and cushion interiors often come without options, the one place where you can really see how a difference in quality directly affects the price is in the cover. It won’t surprise anyone to know that higher quality fabrics and leathers cost more money. Thicker fabrics, fabrics made with more natural materials If you would like to learn more about the different types of leather and what the various terms mean, do take a look at our Leather Sofa Buying Guide blog post.  

Tailored features, button detailing, scroll arms and inset panels, in fact most traditional sofa details, will push the price up as they require a high level of skill and a larger amount of time for an upholsterer to make them.

Then we have the additional features which also add to the price. The addition of a good quality fold out sofa bed mechanism, adjustable headrests, slide out seats, electric recliners or manual recliners, tilt and lift features, storage sections, anything that moves or isn’t an ordinary part of a sofa can add quite a bit to the price. Not only are you looking at the cost of the parts themselves, but also the way in which the sofa is upholstered and the way in which the sofa is built has to be altered to accommodate moving parts.

These are all very good reasons for a sofa to be expensive, but the real question here is this:

Are expensive sofas worth it?

The short answer is almost always yes.  A higher quality sofa isn’t just about looks, or even comfort – it’s also about durability, and having a sofa that will last a long time will make a big difference to how much you end up spending overall. A good quality sofa will look great for years, it will feel comfortable for years, and when you eventually decide to change it, you’ll be able to sell it on rather than throw it away. That’s not just better for your wallet, it’s better for the environment too – it’s far, far better to have something sturdy and lasting that can be used for many years than it is to have something disposable, even if the disposable product can be recycled. After all, recycling takes energy, but reusing does not.  

To really appreciate the difference between a high quality and a cheap sofa you have to look beyond the price ticket to see what the true cost is.

A well-made, expensive sofa will:

• Last for years (ten or more is usual, twenty or even thirty years isn’t uncommon)
• Continue to be comfortable for years, too
• Look good for years
• Have replaceable parts and be serviceable
• Have a significant resale value on the second-hand market

On the other hand, a cheap sofa will:

• Last a much shorter length of time
• Be less comfortable and lose comfort more quickly as the fillings become compressed
• Start to look tired quickly
• Have to be disposed of rather than repaired
• Be pretty much worthless secondhand

So, what does this mean for your costs? For the high quality sofa, you pay more initially and then enjoy a longer period of ownership. When you decide to update your home, you can sell it for a portion of the price you originally paid, and you can put that money towards the cost of your new sofa. For the cheap sofa, you pay less initially, but you’ll have to replace it more frequently, potentially six times sooner than the high quality sofa, and when you come to dispose of it at the end of its’ life it has no resale value left. If you imagine you purchase a £2500 three seater sofa that lasts you twenty years, and at the end of that time you sell it on for £300. That’s a net cost to you of £2200. Alternatively, you buy a cheap sofa for £600 that wears out in 5 years. Over a twenty year period, you’ll go through four of those cheap sofas, and assuming the price doesn’t go up over that period you’ll pay a total of £2400. After twenty years you will have spent £200 more than you would if you purchased a high quality sofa, plus potentially the cost of disposing of the used sofas, and you’ll have been pretty uncomfortable for most of that time.

This is called the Sam Vimes "Boots" Theory of Economics, as detailed in the popular Discworld series by Sir Terry Pratchett, but it’s not a new concept. The old saying “buy cheap, buy twice” neatly encapsulates the idea that it costs more money to buy things cheaply. But it’s still not the entire story, because if you’re reading this the chances are you don’t want to spend thousands of pounds per sofa.

Well, we’ve got some good news for you, because with a little compromise you can enjoy all the benefits of owning a high quality sofa without paying an eye-wateringly high price.

How to Pay Less for High Quality Sofas

In a move that will surprise absolutely nobody who knows what our company does, we are going to recommend that you purchase a sofa that is on clearance. The biggest bargains can be found by looking at ex-display model, but you can generally save money on high quality sofas in unused condition if they are overstock, sample pieces or otherwise pre-made. You can find more information about clearance sofas on our online guide “What is an ex-display sofa?”, but the gist of it is that clearance sofas have already been built. The compromise may be that you cannot choose the colour you wanted, or that the suite doesn’t come in the exact combination you originally were looking for, or for more heavily reduced items they may have a minor cosmetic issue, but if you can be flexible about these things the benefits are huge. An ex-display sofa will last just as long and be just as comfortable as a brand new sofa, with the obvious benefit that you don’t have to pay as much for it. Let’s go back to our example of buying a sofa. As we covered already, your brand new, made to order £2500 sofa lasts you twenty years and can be resold for £300 when you decide to change it out. But what if instead of ordering that sofa in your choice of colour, you found one for sale on clearance? You would normally expect to save between 40 and 50% off the price of an ex-display sofa, so now that sofa is only costing you £1250. But here’s the trick – when you come to sell it, it’s still worth the same second-hand as the made to order sofa you would have paid £2500 for. That means instead of costing you a total of £2400 for the cheap sofas over twenty years, or £2200 for the made to order sofa, your total cost over twenty years is just £950!

Now it’s worth noting here that not everybody shops the same way. Some of us like to keep our furniture until it literally falls apart, and some of us like to change the look of our living room every five years regardless of what condition the sofa is in. But herein lies the beauty of buying an ex-display sofa, because the price difference between ex-display and “barely used” second-hand is almost nothing – meaning you absolutely can get almost all of your money back if you decide to sell your old ex-display sofa on after just a few years. We have even had a few of our customers come back to tell us that they sold their sofa and got back everything they paid for it, something that you can't really say when you're having something made to order.

To sum up, it is almost always worthwhile paying more to get a higher quality sofa, especially if you’re buying something that has been genuinely heavily discounted. We hope you’ve enjoyed reading our blog post! As always, we’re open to comments and suggestions, so feel free to leave a comment here or email [email protected].

Coming up next in our Savvy Sofa Shopping series, a very useful article about how you can sell your old sofa to raise money to finance your new one. Stay tuned!

If you’re interested in purchasing an ex-display or reasonably priced brand new, high quality sofa, we recommend a visit to our dedicated sofa showroom in Chorley – or you can browse our website and see a selection of what we have available.