Sharps v Hammonds Furniture

Former_MSE_Andrea

Hi

Hammonds has asked to respond. MSE doesn't endorse anything a company says on the Forum.

We’re sorry to hear that you have concerns about placing an order with us, but please be assured that we make every effort to ensure our customers are happy. As a family-run business we pride ourselves on giving our customers a high quality service, with furniture that is lovingly made by our own skilled craftsmen. With over 80 years of experience, we have built up happy and loyal customer bases that return and ask us to transform another room in their home.

Whilst there is the occasional negative review, we also receive hundreds of positive reviews from happy customers. At Hammonds Furniture, we listen to our reviews and where a customer has not been entirely satisfied we ensure that this is changed swiftly. Reviews are an important part of how we develop and tailor our service to your needs. We reply to every customer comment and investigate any complaints and make every effort to ensure that any issues are resolved.

The Hammonds online team

tired_dad

My advice would be to visit showrooms,call planners, get quotes from several different companies.

We did this with spacemaker, hammonds, rhino. Visited sharps showroom and didn't like what we saw.

It's very personal. You will come to a clear conclusionas to what works for you. Quality will cost. It's as simple as that

spencerdog

Following on from my post last year I decided to have another bedroom fitted - obviously because i was so happy with my previous installation from Elegant Bedrooms i went back to them with my requirements. They listened to what I required and recommended that i look at their sister company called Geha Bedrooms it was a German brand and i was a little dubious as to what i would find, but to be honest it was the best quality bedroom furniture i had seen for years, it was a little more expensive and it did take a little longer for it to arrive from Germany but it was well worth the wait, again the service and quality were faultless. they do have a showroom so you can see the quality, i would recommend to anyone. :money:

Harper_House

Glad to see that Strachan are offering a sale this January - same as every other month of the year! According to my 'designer' the price remains the same whenever you buy.

If you are looking to buy from this organisation, it might be a good idea to consider the following:

1. Ask to see the prices in their price book. I managed to do so and was very surprised at what they were charging for individual pieces (I was told the the prices quoted included fitting on each piece - surely they should be charging for these seperately, which would save the customer a fortune.
2. Although the furniture is supposed to be fitted, suggesting a bespoke service, this appears not to be the case. Any alteration from a standard size would appear to attract a 20% surcharge.
3. The quality of fit appears to be at best equivalent to Hammonds, which is around half the price and where every piece of furniture is made to measure.
4. Even if you are tempted, please get a competitive quote from an alternative supplier like Hammonds, or Sharps After all, what have you got to loose?

mac4321

Sharps are absolutely shocking and I would certainly warn anybody off from using them. Poor workmanship, cheap and nasty cupboards. Bare-faced lies told by the salesteam about a bespoke service but their products are standard, meaning cupboards not made to fit the space and instead lots of 'dead-space' created! This was despite promising the very opposite!
As for the carpenters - they simply didn't run up on their allocated day and then didn't turn up on the next allocated day! Dealing with customer services meant lots of unreturned messages and confusing phone-calls.
They cut wood in the house creating a huge amount of mess and didn't clean up.
They cupboards look awful.
I wish I had gone to ikea.
Have been deeply upset by this product. Thought I would get quality for the £1300 it cost, but I have been completely ripped off. Please, please don't make the same mistake!!

eh321

If you happen to be considering Sharps Bedrooms for a fitted wardrobe, please do yourself a favour: stay well away.

They are a big, seemingly established company, but they are an absolute disgrace. Hands down the most stressful and unpleasant experience during my house renovation was due to the incompetence of Sharps.

I ordered my wardrobe from Sharps last summer and it still has not been fitted correctly seven months later. I have had four incorrect material deliveries, seven missed fitting appointments, three missed planning appointments (each time, they simply do not turn up and only if you are lucky they call you half an hour into the scheduled appointment time to tell you they won't be coming). My interactions with the staff here have led me to believe that everyone here is incompetent, lazy, stupid and rude. Customer service is a joke. Designers/planners are totally incapable of doing their jobs and clearly couldn't care less about their customers. Nobody returns emails or calls.

I would not want anyone else to go through the hideous experience that I had with this company. Honestly, avoid at all costs.

Sam120874

I have had 2 bedrooms fitted by Sharps & 1 home office fitted by Hammonds, I can honestly say out the 2 Sharps win hands down. The only good thing about Hammonds is that the units have back in them. I am in the process of trying to sort out compensation from Hammonds due to the first fitter being a cowboy & taking a chunk out of my oak stairs. It took them over 3 weeks from day 1 of fitter turning up to finish room which is the box room so not very big. I insisted an inspector came out, he then had to redo the half of the room the first fitter done. It was estimated for day & half. This room needed to be finished before I had a knee op, it's finished but didn't get chance to put anything away. Hammonds have offered £250 worth of Hammonds vouchers, which are no good to me at all. I was told a manager would call last Monday but no call & today I received a letter requesting final payment, it wasn't until I rang up I was told about the vouchers & now been advised to email higher up, which I still haven't received the email address. I've made it clear I am a disabled lady who isn't allowed any stress at all but that's all they seem to do is stress me out with their arrogance

jyh

My free standing Ikea wardrobes were showing some wear after 9 years so was thinking to have some fitted wardrobes made. An email quote from a local carpenter with good reviews was £2800, so I wanted to see how the big companies compare. Saw a couple of discussions online (hadn't come across the MSE one then) which seem to suggest people have had slightly better experience from Sharps than Hammonds, so booked an appointment first with Sharps.

I was expecting to be wowed by some 3D visualization from the "design consultant/salesman" which is supposed to tempt the customer to place an order straight away, as I read this is how these companies operate. A man in his 60s or 70s turned up (who obviously found it hard to adjust to 21st century tech, as he grumbled about how unreliable these things were when I mentioned something re their website.) He proceeded to measure and started to draw the room with a pencil on grid paper. Asked me what I do for a living (trying to gauge what sort of ridiculous quote he could get away with no doubt). He wasn't really interested in helping me realise what I wanted, and didn't really listen. For most of the questions I had re the style I would like, I got, "no you can't do that", "no we don't do that any more", "no that would be more expensive". When I asked what the join of the wardrobe frame at the wall where there are some boxed pipes would look like, he started to draw the plan of the room on paper (what's the point? I know what my room looks like; there are two wardrobes and a bed. I am no artist but am more than capable of drawing a few rectangulars myself).

I asked him for a price list of all the internal fittings and was ignored. (By the way, the drawers are just two standard sizes and cannot be made to measure, so might as well get Pax from Ikea) Instead he started to write down that with 50% discount and further 20% web discount and a £500 discount on fittings, the wardrobe price would be £3500 (just for a 2.4m wide wardrobe) Throughout he was behaving as if it were going to be a firm order and started writing everything down on an order form. I told him I wouldn't order right there and then as I have to get other quotes from other companies. He asked me which companies, and said that Hammonds would come out cheaper but they didn't offer 12 year guarantee, so in the end it would cost me twice as much, and mumbled that "if you were rich then you could do that sort of thing, etc, etc." He then said if I didn't order straight away the price he just gave me would not apply as I would not get any of the discounts and also the installation date could not be guaranteed. (meaning if I came back and ordered from them any other day, I would need to pay through the nose and with no promise that they would install on the dates that suit me? so why would I bother?) As I did not seem to want to jump at these fabulous discounts he then offered to reduce the price further to £3000 if I ordered right away. When I repeated that I need to compare with other quotes, he obviously got so offended by the fact that I did not want to hand over £3000 to a complete stranger after 20 mins during which he had done nothing to impress me as a customer that he left in a hurry.

I must say I found this "consultation" thoroughly unhelpful. He was abrupt and rude throughout and this is probably the worst sales pitch I have ever come across. This has completely put me off buying from Sharps, even if they really do produce good products. I don't like hard sell and bullying tactics and I don't believe in these crazy fictitious discounts that they just make up. If you can still make a profit after 70% discount then your prices were overblown to start with. Why not offer a decent price to begin with so that people would be more interested? The fact is nobody would buy their very ordinary goods if they didn't create the illusion of a high-end, high quality, expensive product being heavily discounted. Plus the so called £500 discount on fittings is just laughable. The wardrobe he proposed for me had only 3 clothes rails in it as fittings. He could have said it's a 90% discount off the wardrobe or £1000 off fittings and it would have made no difference to the quote since it was all plucking figures out of the air. There are no doubt satisfied customers out there but I think I'd rather not take a chance as this first contact has done nothing to give me the confidence to buy from them.

jyh

came across these on Screfix's carpenter forum. they are dated from 2007 but interesting reading nevertheless.

---I agree with "dirtydeeds". I could be wrong but I think Sharps Bedrooms are part of the same consortium that owns Kitchens Direct and Dolphin Bathrooms. They are all sold by salesmen who work on a commission only basis and they also design them which means they frequently don't fit and they expect the fitters to "bail them out" all the time. It will more than likely be price work with next to no support if everything goes pear shaped due to incompetence on their part. I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole!

---hi basher. i worked for them about 3 years ago for 6 months i didnt really have a great time i joined them when they where going through a bad period sending things out the wrong hand, bits missing, customers taking delivery of components and waiting for six weeks for fitting nice piece on watchdog about them. you just didnt know what you were walkng into. you work on a percentage which can be really good . the best i did was 150 for a day no probs and 5 miles down the road. i also have a friend who works for them and has done for years and is happy and earns good money. you basically have to take the **** no one wants for a while then once youve done that you can throw your weight around if your any good demand a bit more money or turn jobs down if you dont like the look of them or you think they are too far. i was too soft and travelled up to 60 miles for 80 quid a day sometimes. you dont get payed till the customer signs your sheet only ever had one customer do this coz they thought they where getting wardrobe backs and they didnt i had to wait 3 weeks for my money.Basically you will be slow and not earn great money to start you will work late get stressed and make a few mistakes coz your chucked in at the deep end but if you can get through that you will do ok, your money is always there unless customer doesnt sign. to sum up when its good its really good when its bad its really bad

---Sharps are the same group as Dolphin, Meuben etc.

In the last year I have had to remove a kitchen and a bedroom installed by them. In each case the customer (different ones each time) had been pressured to agree, sold an inappropriate design. The fitters had been under such time pressure that they had to bodge to get it done and were unable to deal with missing components, design snaffus or inapporpriate time estimates. In both cases the fitter had disappeared at the end promising to get the remaining items sorted and didn't .....

My wife used to advise at Citizens Advice and found that the sharpes/dolphin/meuben group were one of the top problem retailers - high pressure sales, rip off credit terms, bad quality, no customer service etc etc.

Whether as a customer or as a fitter/subcontractor my advice is have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH THEM.

---I've done a fair bit for them and chekov and peterob have covered most of the bases. The main problems are very poor surveys that result in designs frequently not fitting, frequently damaged or poor quality materials (especially worktops!!), long hours due to tight deadlines/distance, having to fit a ship in a bottle and most of all being expected to constantly sort out everyone else's incompetence for ** all more money. I never thought of it as good and you will quickly become angry and disheartened.
Also, I don't know what's going to happen with the CIS changes as I understand you can work more than about 60% of the time for one employer and Sharps expect their subbies to be at their beck and call at ALL times.

neilharr

have used these guys before for a simple fitted wardrobe, the job was ok but they left a mess and despite a litany of calls it fell on deaf ears despite assurances they would collect - last time i will use them.

Unfortunately my mother has just used their services - they really surpassed themselves on this occasion, i can only assume the men fitting the wardrobes also had white sticks and labradors...its not inconceivable the labradors would have done a better job.

Apart from the quality including the drawer linings and the fact the curtains don't shut all the way due the 'designer' making a hash of the drawings the after sales services is appalling again - just a 300 pounds discount. have now taken over and will be asking for them to remove the wardrobes and a refund or a significant discount ie 40-50%