Komentar :
S S (10/12/2015 14:00)
I have a meh wood dining table purchased from Karo Teak Bt Batok with growing cracks on ends growing slowly and white spots & irregular surfaces.
Plus out of two chairs one has a twisted leg.
This has been the replacement order but this company never learns from the defects. Owner is not responding to clear this defective product.
John Jorden (19/09/2013 11:33)
Agree with Jeff: Buyer Beware.
I’ve tried hard to let the chaos of working with this company leave my mind but now several months later, I think its fair to write a review that will hopefully aid others to not make the mistakes we made. When growing up, we learn that if its too good to be true, it normally is.
Just about all of their furniture is custom so you’re ordering based on the floor samples and catalogs – totally fine and actually ensures you get what you want. This place does a great job selling and designing furniture per your requests – offers a great price and delivery time – but fails in execution. We ordered a lot of furniture from Karo Teak after arriving in Singapore: dining set, bed, side tables, coffee table, and a TV entertainment console.
A quick summary of what ended up being a 6-month saga from when we ordered it until we finally agreed to cut our losses and stop working with this company:
1. Products were supposed to be delivered in 4-6 weeks but the first product arrived in 8 weeks and the last in 14 weeks. The only reason given was “its on the boat” but after each shipment our items did not arrive.
2. All products developed cracks in the wood – some minor hairline cracks but some massive cracks that were visible from 20 feet away. Their attempt at fixing the cracks on the entertainment console was laughable. First they used a completely wrong color and did not even attempt to match the color. Then they picked up the console to work on it in their shop only to fail again in the worksmanship. Then they tried again and actually succeeded but ended up damaging one of the doors in the process – which required another 4 trips / recoats to fix! I understand that working with wood can be challenging but this is just terrible quality when all of the products developed cracks (note we own other teak furniture from John Erdos that did not crack in 1 year of use so far)
3. Delivery issues: deliveries are contracted out to people who do not speak English (I understand we’re in Singapore but its not like they spoke Mandarin either). Our deliveries were late, on two occasions they damaged walls. See above comment on damaging furniture, too. Because of delays in their shipments, the delivery company came at least 6-8 times to deliver 1-2 pieces at a time.
4. Customer service: e-mails will go unanswered for days/weeks. Shop will randomly close on weekends. Calls will go unanswered. On one comical night after trying to find out the status of my order, the assistant left the phone off the hook so I could not call back. I ended up driving to the shop as I assumed that this is what happened and – when finding her smoking cigarettes in the shop with her boyfriend(?) - she admitted she just did not want to talk anymore.
5. The owner is deceitful, angry, rude, and an awful business man.
6. Ultimately, we gave up and decided to only keep the dining set, entertainment console, and coffee table. The rest of items were returned. Since we’ve stopped interacting with them, our dining table has developed a 30cm crack that is very wide; we called our own person to repair it and their comment was “very cheap worksmanship from Indonesia … the wood was not properly dried. This is very bad.”
Are we happy with the remaining furniture … maybe at the prices we paid for it. But when you consider the hassle and awful customer service of dealing with this company then obviously we would have been much happier with Ikea or sitting on the ground. Without a doubt
Fortunately for us, we paid minimal down payment and this was the only leverage to ensure we got what we wanted throughout the process. We ended up buying a lot of our furniture from John Erdos during one of their 20% off sales. The prices will still be higher than Karo Teak but for the customer service and quality (nothing has cracked!), I wish we made this decision from Day 1.
We moved to Asia with our eyes wide open and accepted something too good to be true. Hopefully it’s a mistake you will not make, too.
Farrera Ferry (18/01/2013 04:01)
Just bought some nice antique sofas. the carving is superb! good quality AND good price. just had an open house and people were complimenting about it. will definitely head down again to get new furnitures!
Jeff Spencer (10/01/2013 03:27)
Buyer Beware! We bought a nice dining table and chairs. After 1 month, the table top began to split apart. We had them replace the table. Again the, after a month the wood shrank and split. Do not buy from these guys. the quality is very poor.