Buying furniture directly from Italian factories sounds straightforward: choose the model, agree the finish, wait for the lorry. It rarely goes wrong at the choosing stage. It goes wrong in the four months between the order and the moment someone has to carry a crate up a staircase.
These are the five mistakes we see most often, and what to do instead.
1. Treating a lead time as a delivery date
Furniture at this level is made after you order it, not taken from a warehouse. Production runs from roughly 8 to 24 weeks depending on the factory, the finish and how much of the piece is bespoke. That window is production only: shipping, customs clearance and assembly come after it.
Two dates catch people out every year. Most Italian factories close for much of August, and again around Christmas and New Year. An order confirmed in July with a 10-week lead time does not arrive in September.
What to do: pick the date you want to use the room, count backwards through assembly, delivery, clearance and production, and place the order against that. If the date is immovable - a move-in, a wedding, a hotel opening - say so at the quotation stage, when the factory can still be chosen for its speed.
2. Forgetting that someone has to be the importer
A quotation for furniture is not the cost of furniture arriving at your door. Depending on the destination there may be import duty, local VAT or sales tax, customs brokerage, inland delivery and, for a private address, a crane or a porterage crew.
Ask one question before you compare any two offers: at which point does the seller's responsibility end? Ex works means it ends at the factory gate and everything after it is yours to arrange. Delivered to the door means the opposite. Both are legitimate, and the difference between them is substantial.
What to do: establish who is the importer of record, which rates apply in your country, and whether your delivery address can physically receive a lorry. A local customs broker will answer the first two in a single email, long before the goods exist.
3. Measuring the room and not the route
The sofa fits the living room. It does not fit the lift, the turn on the second landing, or the door frame that someone narrowed with architrave twenty years ago.
What to do: ask for the crate dimensions, not the product dimensions, and measure the whole path - door widths, ceiling height on the stairs, the diagonal of the lift car, the turning space on each landing. Where the route is tight, ask at the order stage whether the model is available knocked down, with the back or the legs removable, or whether the factory can split a long piece into sections. It is an easy change on a drawing and a very expensive one on a landing.
For every model in our catalogue we publish the factory's 2D drawings and 3D models, so this can be checked on paper weeks before anything is built.
4. Choosing finishes on a screen
Two screens never show the same colour, and no screen shows weight, grain or sheen. Wood is a natural material: two doors from the same programme in different production batches will not be identical, and a veneer darkens with light over the years. Leather varies hide to hide by design.
What to do: order samples of the finishes you are deciding between, and look at them in the actual room, at the time of day you will use it, next to the floor and the wall colour they will live with. Ask whether the factory can keep pieces from the same batch together when a programme is split across several rooms. And ask, specifically, how a finish is expected to change with light: on a classic walnut it is noticeable within a year.
5. Leaving assembly and claims to the last week
Who unpacks the crates? Who assembles a wardrobe, who levels a table on an uneven floor, who takes the packaging away? And if a marble top arrives chipped, who photographs it, within how many days, and to whom?
Carriers and factories both work to notice periods, usually short, and a claim raised after the deadline with no photographs of the crate is a claim that fails. The most common loss we see is not damage - it is damage that cannot be proven.
What to do: agree assembly in writing when you order, not when the lorry is outside. On delivery day, photograph every crate before it is opened, note any external damage on the delivery document before signing, and open everything within the notice period even if the room is not ready. A crate left sealed for three months is uninsurable in practice.
The questions worth asking before you order
1. What is the production time for this finish, and which closure periods fall inside it? 2. Where does your responsibility end: factory gate, port, kerbside or room? 3. What are the crate dimensions and weights? 4. Can the piece be dismantled for the route, and is that a factory option or site work? 5. Which samples can I see before confirming? 6. Who assembles, who removes the packaging, and how long do I have to report damage?
Six questions, answered in writing, remove almost every bad surprise from a furniture order placed across a border.
We supply directly from the factories we work with and quote on request, with the production time stated honestly rather than optimistically. Send us the models or the room, and we will set out the schedule and what is included at each step before you commit.
