Making Buying Furniture Better
Since I started working here at The Furniture Market.co.uk™ back in late 2010 I started asking myself on a daily basis, “how can I make the website better for visitors?.” I didn’t really know a lot about furniture before I started.. I knew about IKEA and how it seems that Tesco direct and Asda living were springing up on every retail park. The more I looked at the oak furniture in the show room room the more I came to realise that we were selling some quality furniture here, so how could I best display this on the site?
I thought to myself. One of the great things here at the furniture market ™ is that we have our studio to take pictures of furniture. This means we have the ability to take multiple pictures of furniture and present them in the best way so that you get a feel of the look and style of the piece and how its made. We are in the process of upscaling our images so that you get to see bigger thumbnail images. Our main images are also usually on the large side so you get to see the quality of the workmanship. I have personal experience of how workmanship is important.
Before I started working at the furniture market ™ I bought a bed from a well know high-street retailer, I noticed when putting the bed together the bed slats were a little odd. one was shaped in a way that I can only describe as a banana, I screwed the slats together eagerly in anticipation of a good nights sleep. It was becoming more and more obvious that the bed I had bought from this retailer.. (that rhymes with Bargos) the slats were coming up short almost an inch in some cases.. I was having to bodge the screws into the supports. and generally I thought there’s something not quite right here.
Skip forward a couple of months and I am left a little unhappy to say the least. I don’t make a habit of complaining but the more I come to learn about furniture and how its made the more I realise I did not get what I paid for from this well known catalogue company. Or maybe I did? I simply sat on the side of the bed. When you take a closer look at what has happened, you can see that the wooden slats themselves have sheered…
So it’s off to B&Q for some more wood to fix the problem. This has now happened on 2 wooden slats on the same bed. I’m not impressed… what this did do however was make me take a closer look at just how a piece of furniture is finished. The slats on my bed were composed of what seemed like offcuts of wood in a kind of zig-zag formation.. The grain of the wood differed greatly. It kind of reminded me about how they make some meats in factories from “reformed” cuts. It’s not appropriate to talk about this process on a furniture blog needless to say if you do a little research you will see what I am on about.
I was walking through the showroom one day and I noticed this bed being assembled and I took a closer look. I was genuinely impressed you could see the quality of the wooden support slats. The main support beam had chunky dovetail joints and screws holding it securely in place. Each slat is flush with the frame of the bed, and were noticeably thicker than the slats on my bed at home. What really struck me however was the price.
Now although the French beds we sell are not to my taste, I could have bought one of these bed’s with the intricate carving for the same price as the bed I have got from ‘that’ catalogue shop. I will know in future what to look out for when I am next buying a bed. I will only ever buy a solid oak bed in the future. But there is a problem when you buy from a catalogue or furniture website, but where there is a problem there is also a solution to I believe. To continue to make buying furniture better, I needed to roll out a program of putting better images on the site, more images. Images of things only people who have been let down in the past look for.
You can get away with compromising on quality on some items and not with others. Items like beds are not an area where you can compromise on quality and get away with it. That is why I am sold on the beds we sell here at the furniture market ™ . The quality of these beds, the workmanship and how they are put together are very impressive when you consider the price you are paying.
Every day I am here at the furniture market ™ I will strive to make it better for you and for people like me who have been let down by buying furniture before based on what they thought was a companies reputation. As we take most of the images of actual furniture here in the studio, it is usually easy for us to take some extra images for you if you would like to see them. In the mean time I will keep working on ways to present the true quality of the furniture we sell here in the best way possible.
If you would like to see any additional images of natural oak furniture you can contact us via email [email protected] or call us on 01829 759259 lines are open between 9am and 6pm and we will try to answer any questions you might have.