Buy a Sofa Online? Wayfair Is Counting on It
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
One confusing and annoying problem with retailers like Wayfair, and the many other outlets (Overstock, Barcelona Designs and many others), is that most of their inventory is white-labeled; they buy no-brand products from Asia (China being the main one) which they sell under fictional brand names such as "Ivy Bronx", "Langley Street", "Wade Logan" and so on. You'll find the exact same products elsewhere under other fictional brand names. Often I've been able to find a product, such as a lamp, that's maybe $100 on Wayfair, being sold for $200 in a different online store; exact same product, made in the same Chinese factory, but differently branded.
The shadiness undermines the integrity of the brand, but it means it's also impossible to predict the quality of what you order. "Langley Street" is just a style, and isn't necessarily all from the same manufacturer. This confusion is compounded by the fact that Wayfair also mixes "authentic" products such as Flos and Artemide into their inventory.
But also, a lot of these products are just complete junk. So much is laminate, cardboard and fiberboard. There's surprisingly good, solid-wood furniture made in places like India and Thailand, but usually the online descriptions doesn't give you the full materials list. A lot of times you can get quality hardwood, but the joinery is terrible (lots of patching, glue, etc.).
Not with 100 percent certainly, but a lot better than some staged photos on a website.
Most retail furniture stores in the US (Blu Dot, Room and Board, West Elm, Herman Miller, Vitra, Knoll, Steelcase, etc.) either design their own furniture in-house or have name-brand designers (e.g. Eames, Jasper Morrison, etc.) they collaborate with. (Sometimes the manufacturer also produces their own "generic" white-labeled versions; for example, the factory that makes Knoll sofas apparently also makes identical/near-identical no-name sofas that are sold under different brand names at much, much lower prices, and if you have some inside information you can find out where to get these.)
Then there are high-end retailers like DWR, YLiving, Lumens, etc. that are more like Amazon in that they mostly don't rely on white-labeling.
If I always get crap I can plan around it - sometimes I do need just crap as a stop gap.
If it's unreliable and can't predict based on price and descriptions, I just won't bother.
The problem was color: the photography online was typically very different from the final product. We kept thinking there was a simple fix: send sample veneers to a customer to let them see what the actual product looks like. They could rent them out like lots of other furniture places do with fabric. I'd easily drop $100 on rent if I didn't have to deal with returning something.
We also had one coffee table that was half-stained: they literally forgot to stain half the table.
Second time ordering lights, they were missing a part. After trying unsuccessfully of having the manufacturer ship us the missing part the order was cancelled. Again the return was handled no problem.
Third order the product was satisfactory.
Gotta hand it to their support though, returns were handled no questions asked and seamless. Makes putting up with the hassle almost worth it.
Price is not an indicator. My grandfather bought a couch and coffee table from Ethan Allen in the 1960s. They seemed to have been carved from a single block of wood and weighed a ton. Now everything they sell feels like it is made of cardboard, but it costs thousands and thousands of dollars.
But yeah, in general, furniture like sofas really needs to be experienced, it's almost impossible to return, and you'll hopefully have it for a long time. Of course, even experiencing something in person is no guarantee and, as you say, a lot of furniture these days is basically crap.
The solid wood choices I thought were really beautiful for furniture (for the aesthetics and tactile qualities) are teak, oak, mahogany, and american walnut, all of which are rather dense (e.g. Asian teak is extremely heavy, while walnut is just as dense as MDF).
When it arrived they put it together and everything was fine. Then a month later a seam popped. I called them and they said, "We can send someone to fix it, no charge, or give you $230, your choice". I assume $230 was the cost of repair.
You really need to see the couch in person before buying it. It’s really hard to judge quality otherwise. You need to feel the fabric of the sofa, sit and lay down on it to feel the cushions, and see the color in person. Our first trip to Ikea was meticulously researched, but when we saw the options we had chosen online in person we completely changed our minds.
We did find a couch we loved on Wayfair but there were few photos and the description of the item was incorrect. The item was a chaise sectional listed as reversible (the chaise could be switched between the left and right sides) but the item listed two separate prices for left vs. right. When I messaged Wayfair about the issue through their ‘Questions’ option on the item they responded quickly only to say that the item description was incorrect and it was not reversible. However, the item’s description currently remains incorrect and my question was not made public like the others. This, combined with the fact that no official dimensions are included in the item description makes me think Wayfair is a dressed up Alibaba for furniture, and not a serious online option like Article, which at least has a lot of good quality photos per item.
Interestingly, I just checked and it looks like they've corrected the description after I left a 1-star review about it.
Around here, at least the low-end furniture stores like Art Van stock a ton of low-end Chinese-built furniture. Everything is particleboard and laminate, it scratches and peels and is basically junk, but they want to charge full price for it. At least when you buy a cheap table from Amazon it's priced accordingly.
I can see their industry turning upside very quickly. Furniture store are huge, they have tons of sales people making handsome commissions, they rely on selling furniture marked off by 40% with a different 'sale' each week, and make most of their money on the financing arm and fabric protection packages and wood polish extras.
Overstock.com, like Amazon.com (and Walmart.com), is mainly a marketplace these days, with the overwhelming majority of products sold by 3rd party vendors. You will see a wide range of products, and pricing, as you noticed here.
Always shop around. Don't assume that just because its on Amazon|Overstock|Walmart|whatever, that it must be a good deal.
And let's not forget, a lot of people are, for many different reasons. Maybe they're not expecting to stay in the house forever, maybe it's a group of housemates who are buying 'disposable' furniture to avoid dealing with ownership issues, maybe they're low-income.
I really think a lot of this has to do with people's lives and careers being less predictable than they were a few decades ago.
We're back to taking antiques from family members and just reupholstering. The only newer furniture we have that doesn't suck came from Pottery Barn about 10 years ago and has tags from North Carolina.
Isn't that pretty much the only pay these people get, though?
Frame looks to be oriented strandboard: https://homereserve.com/features
I'm pretty rough on things, and one of the strand board back pieces has broken twice. They've mailed me replacements pretty quickly, but I do wish it were a stronger material.
That's the last time I purchase furniture online.
However, when my wife bought a chair on Wayfair, we didn't have any issues. I'd definitely do it again. It all depends on who you buy from.
That means successful furniture stores have become massive, so you can see the goods and buy immediately. In the midwest, Berkshire's Nebraska Furniture Mart and Ikea are are difficult to beat for staple furniture.
But once you see it at Nebraska Furniture Mart (or something from the same manufacturer) you get an awfully sweet deal on it online. That's the near-term play. The long-term play of getting people to buy sight unseen will be far more difficult; Wayfair has traditionally tried price and ease of shipping/returns, but that only goes so far.
I'm currently in the market for a sofa, but this is more of a hobby than anything else - my wife and I don't have the same taste in sofa design, it turns out, so the overlap between what each like is small to start with. Factor in the need to be a nap-comfortable sofa and there's a lot of limitations there. A good sofa should last 20+ years, so I'm willing to take the time to find the right one.
I think rugs are easy to order online relative to other furniture-type stuff, because the general shape is obvious: you don't have to see it in person to know it's going to be shaped like a rug.
I don't mind buying online as long as there are free in-store returns, but that tends to limit me to things like Target, Bed Bath, and a couple others. Some, like West Elm are really sneaky here. A lot of their items are just in a warehouse and are "web only." If it isn't a local warehouse, they don't do free in-store returns, so you again get hit with the ridiculous fee.
I hope to god Amazon does something with free in-store returns with all the Whole Foods real estate they purchased. If you could drop something off (and not worry about packaging it up for return shipping with FedEx), have them handle the return and be done with it, that would save me a lot of headaches AND make me spend a lot more for large online furniture purchases.
In the meantime, I've started experimenting with Modsy, which is great because they have 3d renderings of all the products from various stores, so at least I know the dimensions will be right, and the color should hopefully be a bit more on point. It also lets me visualize it in my space with lots of other stuff which is half the problem. Seriously, the renderings have to be seen to be believed.
I find the Campaign Living concept: https://www.campaignliving.com/products/the-sofa?variant=416... to be an interesting one, however.
EDIT: I'm a fool, and sofas aren't beds.
Cheap furniture goes to hell fast if anyone over ~250lb is sitting on it regularly. Or sometimes for no discernible reason at all. Our experience has been that unless you're buying furniture that puts its high durability right there in the marketing, you may as well buy Ikea, which despite its reputation for being fragile will last at least as long as other cheap (but still more expensive, and often less tasteful) furniture.
The kids like to stand on the arm rests and jump off. We very quickly learned that the entire structure of each arm rest was just a cardboard box, and they both promptly crushed, and now we have deformed, squishy arm rests.
If those steel frame Campaign Living couches actually hold up, they're a good deal at ~$1200. That ugly-ass bulky $800 Ashley Furniture couch with all the faux engraved wood and crap from the furniture store stands a real chance of breaking in short order under very ordinary and careful use, let alone anything extreme. They're garbage. One of several cases in which I think our standard of living gains the last couple decades are kind of fake, disguising lots of things actually getting much crappier as they get less expensive. Though some others, to be sure, have improved—cars, notably, and computers for the most part.
Now, my personal experience with Wayfair has been mixed. They don't manufacture anything themselves, so its usually a hit or miss. I LOVE the bedframe I bought from them, which turned out to be actually manufactured by a Korean company called Zinus. However, a nice headboard that I purchased was of poor quality (it looks nice at first, but the wood is soft... dents easily. The workmanship is not very good, and this is clear even to an untrained eye like mine).
Anecdotally, I had a fantastic experience ordering one through Argos (UK brick and mortar catalogue store that is finally getting its act together online), same day delivery on a Sunday, fit the bill of "I need a cheap mattress tonight".
If I didn't need it same day, then there is no way I'd buy something as subjective as a mattress online..
There's no point looking at a mattress in person; poking and lying down on it doesn't tell you what it's like to sleep on, so you have to go on reviews anyway.
A divan is just a box for the mattress to go on. I wanted some particular mechanical properties, which i could check by sending emails. Staff in a shop wouldn't have had a clue.
https://www.landofbeds.co.uk/sleepeezee/ottoman-beds/fabric/...
Pillows are pretty much all the same to me and are replaced regularly so I'll buy those online if there's a sale.
Madness.
I'll defer to you, as I haven't actually even been in one, personally.
[1]http://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/handel-konsumgueter/... (can't find the exact print-article I read...)
edit: grammar
This is an example of where you want an item to be shipped a single time. Amazon has a problem where big items can end up looking like they've been shipped two or three times, which of course increases the chances of damage.
In addition to the dot com madness, furniture is expensive to warehouse and ship.