It's no secret that, in independent furniture retail, returns are a real margin killer – but one Shrewsbury store owner discovered that technology may be the answer …
I've run a furniture shop in Shrewsbury for 11 years. Two floors, mostly sofas and dining sets, the kind of place where people sit on everything twice before they buy.
Last year we took back nearly £19,000 of perfectly good furniture, and almost none of it was faulty. It just didn't fit the room the customer brought it home to. Every one of those came back as a redelivery, a restock, and a sofa I then had to shift as ex-display at a loss.
The thing that finally bent that number was getting people to see the piece in their actual room before it left my floor, with image to 3d on their own phone.
The £1,400 corner sofa that came straight back
The one that pushed me to do something was a corner sofa, £1,400, the big right-hand chaise. The woman buying it had measured the wall. It fit. She was sure.
It came back in nine days. Once it was in her lounge, she couldn't open the door onto the garden, and the chaise sat right across the radiator. She wasn't wrong about the wall. She was wrong about everything else in the room.
I ate the redelivery both ways, knocked it down to £1,050 as ex-display, and it sat on my floor for two months. That's most of a week's profit gone on one sale that should've been simple.
I almost didn't bother with it
I nearly didn't try it. I'm 61, I've sold furniture since I was 22, and the idea of standing in my own shop fiddling with a phone app felt daft.
My daughter set it up for me on a wet Tuesday with no customers in. We took that same ex-display corner sofa, the £1,400 one still sitting on my floor, made a model of it, and dropped it into a photo of my own front room at home. There it was on the screen, too big for my lounge, in exactly the way it'd been too big for that poor woman's. That was the moment I stopped calling it a gimmick.
The sale that sold me on it
A few weeks later a retired couple were set on our biggest three-seater plus two matching armchairs for their front room. Lovely suite, £2,600 the lot. Before, I'd have written the order and crossed my fingers. This time I asked the husband to text me a photo of the room from the doorway. We dropped models of all three pieces into that photo with image to 3d on my iPad while they watched. The three-seater and two chairs left about a foot to squeeze through to the window.
They saw it themselves, on the screen, in their own front room. We swapped the two armchairs for a single loveseat. They went home happy, and that suite never came back. After that one I started asking for the doorway photo on every order over a grand.
The wardrobe that would have blocked a window
A fortnight ago a young couple came in for a 5ft oak wardrobe for a box room. £680. The husband had the measurements written on the back of his hand, and on paper it sat fine against the long wall. The wife texted me a photo of the room from the landing. We put the wardrobe in, and when the doors swung open in the model they stopped dead against the only window.
They'd have lived with a wardrobe they couldn't fully open, or sent it back to me. We turned it, found the doors cleared if it went on the short wall instead, and they took it that afternoon. Forty quid of my time against a £680 return.
A return isn't one journey, it's three
I used to log a return as one trip in my own head. It's three. Out to the customer, back to me, then out again to the next buyer once I've dropped the price. I use an outside crew for the heavy two-man jobs, the same sort of delivery and installation service plenty of independents lean on now, and every one of those legs is a van and two blokes I'm paying. That £1,400 corner sofa cost me three of those trips before it found a home. The phone check kills the journeys that were never needed in the first place.
What it did to the numbers
Eleven months on, our returns on large items are down by a little over half. I've gone from writing off that £19,000 to under £8,000. In a year where costs are climbing right across retail, that's not a soft saving. That's the gap between a decent year and a flat one. Every sofa that came back was already eating into my margin, and most of them were avoidable with image to 3d, two minutes, and the phone already in the customer's pocket.
I'm not selling you software. I'm telling you the cheapest thing I've done in 11 years to protect a sale. The DFS that opened on the retail park down the road has never once sized a room for someone who then walked over to me, and my nephew, who did a Saturday job on one of those floors, told me the bonus there was for upselling, not for getting the room right.
Near enough half my orders last year came from somebody a past customer pointed my way. Lenleys, the firm I bought my first delivery van off, has lasted 90 years on exactly that.
The retired couple from the loveseat sent their daughter in last month for her own sofa. The thing comes off my floor once, goes into the right room, and stays there. And I've stopped taking back £1,400 sofas that were never faulty, just too big for the lounge they went home to.
Ensuring a suite can fit the room before it is sold can make a world of difference (photo courtesy Pexels/Artbovich)
