Sofa.com present themselves as the Innocent of sofa brands.
I've never met them but after 12 minutes on their website I have an insatiable desire to hang out at their HQ and consume 'lashings of ginger ale'.
So attracted by the promise of a stylish sofa bargain and a free barbecue, we headed off yesterday morning to the sofa.com warehouse sale.
Ouch!
We arrived at a rather functional warehouse near Heathrow which contained 30-40 sofas and around three times that number of confused AB1s.
The root of that confusion was the fact that 90% of those sofas on display had large 'sold' stickers on them.
The obvious next step was to question one of the sofa.com staff to check what the 'process' was.
Unfortunately they were all busy. Customer confusion can be a time consuming business you see.
The obvious next step was to eves-drop.
And from this tactic we discovered there was a bit more stock and a 'master list' of sale items in the office.
So off we went to the office. Excited again.
But unfortunately the queue to investigate the list was put at 2 hours and news quickly filtered through that all the popular styles had gone.
The barbecue (what else to do) was perfectly pleasant if a little off brand (sainsbury's basics range and coke not ginger ale).
But the toilets were taped off presumably so those pesky customers couldn't monopolise them.
So all in all a pretty average brand experience.
A painful reminder that EVERYTHING you say or do effects your brand.
And an example of when it's not a good idea to let your customers see behind the brand (image) veneer.
Advice?
Use your very good website next time.
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