Made.com furniture website on brink of collapse

The consensus from folks in my circle is that the quality of Made products has dropped off entirely. The timber has visible machining marks, joins are not square, product finishes differ a lot from the photos.

I can imagine that during their boom period they flogged a lot of production orders off to cheap factories to meet demand.

I wonder if they have taken a reputation hit and customers are moving off their products, and not so much a cost of living adjustment that is impacting their sales. I suspect that their customers tend towards higher income brackets and are not as impacted by cost of living rises.

It sounds to me like management is refusing to take responsibility for the situation, but at the end of the day they should not have taken on orders that they could not fulfill to a high standard of quality.

They had really great (and different) design pieces, with collaboration with new designers and good prices. It’s a bit of a shame because there’s not really a replacement in their market segment, above Ikea and others, but below luxury brands enough to be affordable. That I know of.

Probably many factors contributed to their downfall, UK economy is not great atm.

Company not website.

However, if the company collapses the website will probably go offline as well.

I was warned off them three years ago for their pish-poor quality, so this is probably related.

Was their offering good, or was it the same undifferentiated Chinese-made particleboard-and-metal-tubing junk that Amazon, Wayfair, and everyone else sells? It seems like their main issues were around their import supply chain, so I assume it was the same stuff you can get anywhere. If they actually, like, manufactured the furniture they sold in the UK they likely would not have a problem, but they were optimizing too hard for those profit margins I guess.

I've long wanted to do a "startup" that sells decent furniture online because it's so painful wading through all the cost-engineered crap out there seemingly at every price-point (even pretty expensive stuff!). The main reason I haven't is that industrial real estate within driving distance of me is currently out of my budget, but I think it would do really well.