The people behind an order

Between a drawing and a carton stand a handful of roles, each with one decision it owns.

Design

Design decides the dimensions and, more importantly, the trade-offs behind them. Whether a shoe cabinet flips out from a shallow body or swings on a hinge is a decision about hallway width. Whether a pantry door slides or opens is a decision about a galley kitchen. Whether a bed sits low with a wide footprint or high with clearance underneath is a decision about who is getting in and out of it.

Most of what this role does is subtract. A cabinet an inch deeper holds more and stops fitting the room it was drawn for.

Structural engineering

The load path is decided here: where the legs go, how many, what section the steel is, whether a span needs a centre rail. The published weight capacity comes out of this work rather than out of marketing, and that is why it is stated as a total with the leg count beside it.

This role also owns the quieter details that decide how a piece ages: slat bearings that are damped rather than bare, drawer runners rated for the load the drawer will actually take, and hole positions that leave enough material at the edge of a panel.

Quality control

Quality control is the role that says no to a batch. Its checklist is the one on our how it is built page: sealed edges, hinge travel, hole positions against the template, hardware counts against the manual, carton corners.

The most valuable thing this role catches is not a broken part. It is a hardware bag one screw short, which turns an evening of assembly into a week of waiting.

Packing

Packing decides how the assembly goes, which sounds backwards until you have assembled something badly packed. Parts numbered on the part rather than only in the manual, hardware bagged by step rather than in one pile, the instruction sheet on top rather than taped to the back of a panel, and the heaviest panel where it protects the rest.

Our own customers say more about this in reviews than about any other single thing, in both directions, and we quote them either way.

Support

Support answers the question that actually gets asked, which is almost never about the whole product. It is about one part, one hole that does not line up, one figure on a page that does not match a tape measure. Getting the right small part to somebody quickly is most of this job.

And this site

This site is the catalogue and the guides. We publish the range, refresh the figures on a schedule, write the guides in house and quote customer reviews as they were written. We do not take payment, hold stock or ship parcels: the buy buttons hand off to the store where a purchase is completed, and everything from payment to returns happens there.

If something here is wrong, that is a thing we can fix. The address is on our contact page, and the whole range is on iPormis furniture.