There may be many Pottery Barn reviews out there and there technically should be no reason to have another, but this is why this blogpost is different.
This, is the review of all reviews regarding the Pottery Barn, in a nutshell.
Foreword
We’ve gotten our fair share of people asking whether we make Pottery Barn slipcovers, and the short answer is yes and no.
Making slipcovers would mean that we’d need to have the template/pattern and measurements to do so, and it’s not as simple as getting 5-6 measurements from their site. That is not to say that it’s rocket science so in short:
- If we have the template, we can make you a slipcover
- If we don’t have the template, we’ll need to get some measurements from you
Needless to say, we’ve had a few people who helped us expand our Pottery Barn template collection – and many others who decided that it wasn’t exactly a project they were willing to partake in.
Is a Pottery Barn worth recovering?
This becomes the main question after many inquiries and not-so-many follow-throughs. It didn’t make sense – our prices were competitively lower than that of Pottery Barn’s and we still aren’t the people’s choice.
What’s going on? Was it us, or just the product itself?
This is where I sought to answer the above question. This is when I decided to get reviews, so I googled:
With the first 4 results I was already awestruck at the negativity this popular brand has garnered. I then ventured into each relevant result to investigate.
Consumer Affairs
With 480 complaints and a 1 star rating, you’d definitely wonder what everyone’s so unhappy about.
In a nutshell these were their concerns:
- Long waiting time: delivery times can take up to a month or beyond
- Poor product quality: a customer was sent a damaged product
- Very bad customer service: many people were put on hold for a good 30 minutes, and reps mostly responded with the “we’re looking into it” line.
- Overpriced
It was hard to believe that these were from actual Pottery Barn customers. It’s a little bit disheartening but from this site alone it seems that customer service was the main reason for these negative reviews.
Where shipping times and product defects can be easily resolved, it mostly came down to how the sales customer service rep handles these issues and unfortunately, most of these customers simply did not get what they paid for.
Yelp
Similarly on Yelp, the main issue was once again with their customer service.
One customer stated that their “customer service are so disrespectful and rude” online, while another in their store was ignored as she stated, “The weird thing is out of the 5 employees I passed, none of them would even make eye contact with me as if I were a leper.”
Is the quality of Pottery Barn deteriorating, or is it just for this store in particular?
Apartment Therapy
In this post, Jessica basically asks whether Pottery Barn sofas are worth the money since she’s read some pretty awful reviews online stating that it’s not.
Overall comments from readers were pretty mixed, given that this thread is about 4 years old and many of the readers commenting are not always relating back to the topic of Pottery Barn.
The couch image used for this thread was of the Pottery Barn Seabury Sofa, which seemed to be well-liked by many of the readers based on their comments.
Maybe Pottery Barn isn’t all that bad?
Reseller Ratings
7 reviews with 5-star ratings, which shows that they’re probably doing something right. Once again it’s unfortunate that there were 40 1-star ratings however.
The pattern seen so far: Price does not justify product, and customer service is plain bad.
All this negativity was draining me and my usual cheery self; then I saw the next result.
Pottery Barn – Home stars
7.4/10 was surprising for me after reading the comments and reviews from the previous links. But after sorting the reviews from highest to lowest I started to understand how this might have happened.
The best reviews all came from three or more years ago, and scored about a 6/10 or more. The more recent reviews (2 years and under) scored about 2/10 or less. The other thing to note was that the good reviews were not so much of the Pottery Barn sofas, but of their other chair and furniture products.
It’s not very conclusive, but I’m swayed towards Pottery Barn losing their mojo about three years ago.
Final Summation
I could probably go all day reading all the comments and reviews but I think we can all safely say that at some point in time, Pottery Barn was good for its price – and had exceptional customer service.
Today, their quality might be somewhat questionable based on the most recent reviews found online. To answer the question we posed today, some of the Pottery Barn sofas might be worth recovering – if they’re still in solid and sturdy conditions. Should you need custom slipcovers made for them, you can contact us too. After all, we can pretty much customise slipcovers for almost any sofa in the world :)
If the sofa is falling apart, it’s probably best to get a new one altogether – the comments from Apartment Therapy would have mentioned quite a few good alternatives.
Hopefully this blogpost had been helpful to you, whether you intend to purchase a new Pottery Barn sofa or just considering the thought of recovering it.
In case you’d like to further your own investigation, here are the other links that made it to the first page of my Google search:
http://pottery-barn.pissedconsumer.com/
https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Pottery-Barn-Reviews-E229757.htm
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