I purchased a Limo Bed from BoConcept Vancouver (located at 300 - 1275 6th Avenue West, Vancouver, BC) on the 12th of December 2007 and it was delivered and assembled by BoConcept in January of 2008. I had just purchased a condo, which had never been lived in the apartment was in pristine condition when I moved in and no furniture had been in my bedroom prior to the BoConcept bed.
On the 23rd of July I was lying in bed when I felt the bed buckle underneath me. I called my boyfriend into the room and he helped me remove the mattress. We instantly saw the problem, one of the slats that holds the mattress in place had popped out but there was also a much bigger problem with the bed the center strut that holds the bed up was completely bent on both sides and there was a very large scratch from where the bent strut had scraped along the floor.
I had a look at the installation instructions which the two original employees had left behind and quickly located the source of the damage. The center strut is installed in two stages: first they screw the piece itself in, secondly they screw four screws into the holes that are located around the main piece in order to evenly distribute the weight of the bed throughout the entire center strut. The four screws had never been installed. I inspected the other two struts located on each of the edges of the bed and they were also missing these 4 screws.
I contacted BoConcept and they sent two employees over on the 25th of July. The employees inspected the bed and took photographs of the damage, they then attempted to disassemble the bed and were unsuccessful. They informed me that they could not take the bed apart because it was too tightly installed and that they did not believe that it could have been installed that way by one of their own technicians. As for the center strut the employee informed me that the screws were unnecessary and that the damage would have been incurred irrelevant of whether the screws had been installed or not. I commented that I thought it highly irregular that a bed should be unable to hold the weight of myself (130 lb) and my boyfriend (150 lb) without breaking he refused to comment. It became abundantly clear during my conversation with the employee that they were not there in order to repair the damage but rather to find a reason not to fix it.
Later that day I received a call from one of the employees who had inspected the bed letting me know that the manager (Larry) would be calling me either on the 28th or the 29th of July.
I missed Larry's initial call on the morning of the 29th but left a message with the receptionist asking him to call me back which he did at 15:40. He outlined 3 reasons why they would not be dealing with my claim:
1) The 1-year warranty had expired.
2) The technicians had measured the damage to the floor and decided that the bed could not have caused it.
3) Their senior employee had installed the bed and he did not believe that it could have been incorrectly installed.
Essentially BoConcept are claiming that the bed was delivered and installed correctly by their employee that we then disassembled it, installed new furniture into the room which caused the damage to the floor (that incidentally perfectly matches up with the strut from the BoConcept bed), then removed this other piece of furniture and reassembled the BoConcept bed back into the bedroom - all in the last year and a half.
I addressed Larry's 3 points as follows:
1) The 1-year warranty is for the bed itself not the installation. Had the bed been correctly installed the damage would not have happened.
2) As for the damage to the floor, he said that it had clearly been there a long time I pointed out that the bed had been there for over a year and a half and that the damage had not been there when the bed was delivered (if it had been the BoConcept employee who installed the bed would have made a note of it).
3) I explained to him that I had the installation instructions in front of me and there were clearly 4 screws missing on each of the struts and that you could clearly see from the wood that those screws had never been installed - he explained to me that the instructions provided were for multiple different beds and that the section that I was referring to must not have been relevant to my specific bed. The instructions are clearly labeled with the name of the bed I purchased.
He said that BoConcept was not interested in dealing with my claim.
I emailed the details listed above to BoConcepts Head Office in the US on the 29th of July and informed them that if they did not contact me within 24 hours I would contact a number of consumerist protection organizations and post my negative experience with their company on websites such as consumerist.com and usaconsumercomplaints.com as a warning to other people who might be thinking of purchasing from their Vancouver location. They did not contact me back.
Anonymous
Vancouver, British Columbia
Canada
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