Why is Your Furniture Order Taking So Long??
If you’ve attempted to order any furniture in recent months you’ve probably noticed that the delivery times are extremely long depending on the brand and level of customization of the furniture. Or perhaps you’ve ordered only to have your delivery date pushed out 5 times. So long sometimes, that you decide to look to other suppliers or even give up completely on that new piece you’ve been wanting for your home. Well, there are a lot of factors that are working against you right now when it comes to timely delivery of your selections. Let’s delve deeper into what is going on with the industry.
Supply Delays
To start with, basically everything needed to make your piece of furniture, whether custom or not, is delayed … the fabric, the foam, the wood, everything. It could be foam from the ice-damaged Texas area or perhaps sourced from other countries which adds an even longer lead time. Regardless of where it is sourced from, shutdowns related to Covid have led to extra-long shipping times for the items your manufacturer needs to complete your order.
Labor Shortage
Now, once your manufacturer has everything they need to complete your order, there is the issue of the current labor shortage that is affecting everyone – including your favorite furniture source. Even if the factory is now fully staffed, keep in mind that the backlog of orders is going to affect us all for an undetermined period of time. There’s no way around that. Highly skilled labor needed for some types of manufacturing are going to be even harder to come by.
Delivery Issues
The labor shortage isn’t just affecting the manufacturing of your furniture order, the shortage of truck drivers is causing a delay even if your item is ready for delivery. You may have experience the issue of expecting an item to arrive in some period of time, but it actually takes much longer. Your manufacturer may be waiting for days or weeks for their truckload of items ready for delivery to even be picked up due to trucks and drivers being unavailable.
Shipping Delays
Last but not least, you may have heard about the current issue of ships docked off the coast of California and other states. To add to the problems manufacturers are having, this is just another obstacle for them that they have no control over.
Read more HERE regarding the cargo ship issue.
As frustrating as these delays are, remember that there are many moving parts businesses have little to no control over. To read more about delayed delivery times in the furniture business, read the article Why the New Sofa You Ordered Is Still So Delayed in House Beautiful Magazine.
So what are we doing to navigate this? So glad you asked!
- We do our best to check stock on items and relay that information to you. It’s possible that between the time we check and the time you pay for the item this has changed and we’ll communicate that asap. So making decisions promptly is key.
- Tracking. We are constantly in touch with our vendors tracking the status so we know if a production or delivery date has been pushed or not.
- Work locally. We love finding and working with local vendors or at least product made in the US that don’t rely as much on shipping.
- Think responsibly. Perhaps we’ll repurpose an old piece of furniture to be new again (also keeping it out of the landfills).
