March, 2010

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The Nabru Sofas

Monday, March 29th, 2010

Nabru is a company that makes modular sofas meaning you can completely customise your sofa, from the size of the cushions down to the number of arms and the colour of the covers. My girlfriend and I were looking to acquire a corner-sofa-bed, which doesn’t sound very complex, but turned out to be as we had tight specifications:

  • no leather or any fabric of the sort,
  • around £1,000 (most sofas in DFS, John Lewis were about £2,000),
  • durable (i.e. hard cushions that stay hard for a long time),
  • has to fit through our flat – we have a corridor making quite a tight angle into the room.

After much shopping and testing, we came across Nabru by searching for corner-sofa-bed on the Internet. In a nutshell, Nabru offers a few ‘standard’ configurations, which you can customize or you can design your own sofa. We went with the latter and visited their showroom to give us an idea of what the fabric looks like and what some of the options are (N.B. you can order fabric swatches to get a proper feel). The sofa arrived a mere 3 days (!!!) after ordering it (we ordered it on a Sunday). I didn’t take a picture of what you receive but you can imagine a pallet full of bits and bops about 6 feet high… quite daunting.

The following videos are to show what the bits look like and give you an idea of assembly. It was very easy but a bit time consuming to put together, but great fun overall. I love the fact that everything is modular and everything can be ordered-reordered afterwards. If you ever have a party and break an arm, you can order it! if you ever stain in in a way that is not washable (all covers come off), you can order new ones!! It is truly amazing.

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Posted in Business, Investment | No Responses »

Is Inflation going to be an issue in the next few years?

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

The subject of this post says it all. I did the piece of work below for an interview at Hawkpoint Wealth Management. The key of this subject is to predict large economic movements of supply of money that will impact inflation. In a nutshell, inflation is driven by the ‘volume’ of money that exists in an economy. Let me illustrate:

  • because banks are failing and the economy is in recession, the government decided to pump ‘liquidity’ to kick start the economy
  • the extra liquidity means that is there is more ‘cash’ in the economy than the latter actually produces (imagine if everybody in the UK received a 30% pay rise for the same amount of work produced)
  • in turn, the increase in cash, decreases the value of the money and prices increase.. here you go: inflation!

Because of this quantitative easing (QE), there is no doubt that there WILL be inflation (some is kinda good) the question is HOW MUCH and WHEN. Well, that, in turns, depends on (1) how quickly the banks (principal recipient of QE) release the cash in the economy and (2) how quickly the UK economy grows to absorb that extra cash. A way round this is, of course, if the extra cash leaves the country ;-)

Now, the latest quarterly figures of the economy show an increase in trade deficit, which, on its own, means nothing. A trade deficit means that the country is importing more than it is exporting… i.e. not a great way to kick start the economy… imagine that instead of producing more ‘stuff’, we just buy it from someone else… all the while more and more cash is being poured in the economy, see a problem there?

So, what can we do? well, have a look at the presentation :-P

Is Inflation Going To Be A Problem ?

Posted in Me | 2 Responses »