Catalog
Cataloguing one-of-a-kind furniture at volume
On Chairish and 1stDibs every item is a new listing, attribution decides the price, and throughput per specialist is the whole economics. How the work is actually structured.
Bulk upload is the organising assumption of most catalog work. Vintage and one-of-a-kind channels remove it. Every piece is a new listing, researched and written individually, and the economics of the whole channel reduce to one question: how many pieces can one trained person catalogue properly in a week?
Attribution before publishing
Period, maker, style and materials are what buyers search and what curation teams check. They are also genuinely hard — the difference between a mid-century piece and a later revival is not something to look up mid-listing. The workable structure is training on attribution first, under review, before anyone publishes: misattribution costs more than a slow listing, because it surfaces as a return, a dispute or a curation strike rather than as a correction.
- —Never guess a maker — an unattributed honest listing beats a wrongly attributed one every time
- —Keep a house reference of the periods, styles and makers your inventory actually spans
- —Route uncertain pieces to whoever holds the deepest knowledge rather than letting them queue
- —Review every attribution during ramp-up, then sample continuously
A house style for condition
Condition reporting is where listings quietly diverge: one specialist writes 'good vintage condition', another catalogues every mark. A shared vocabulary — what counts as wear consistent with age, how flaws are photographed, what must always be disclosed — makes listings consistent across the team and materially cuts buyer questions, which are themselves a throughput tax.
Shipping is a listing-time decision
Parcel, blanket-wrap or freight has to be decided when the piece is catalogued, not after it sells. Deciding it late turns into quoted-shipping delays, margin surprises and cancellations. Deciding it early is just one more field — dimensions, weight, fragility, and the lane that combination implies.
Balance the pipeline, not the people
The commonest failure in this work is a photography pipeline that outruns the listing pipeline, or the reverse. Neither team is doing anything wrong; the ratio is wrong. Watching the ratio — pieces photographed against pieces published, weekly — tells you where the next hire or the next reallocation goes long before a backlog announces it.
Steady-state pieces per specialist per week, times specialists, minus rework. That is the channel's capacity. Every improvement worth making either raises the honest throughput number or cuts the rework — anything else is decoration.