Design Within Reach — Local services in Palo Alto

I ordered an About A Lounge 82 Armchair in October 2021. The estimated delivery date was around February 2022. When February came, I saw no update regarding the order and when it will be delivered. After contacting DWR, I received an email that they would get back to me with information about the order.

After rechecking the order's status, I noticed that the delivery date had been moved from February to May for no reason whatsoever. I had to contact DWR again to understand what was happening since they were not providing any updates, and they replied that they were having supply chain issues.

Later, around March, I looked at the order status to see if they had updated the delivery date for May when the chair was supposed to come, according to the email I received from DWR. To my surprise, now the delivery date was for October, almost one year after I placed the order.

The problem is that I was not getting any updates from the salesperson regarding my order. I had to reach out each time to know what was happening to find out that the delivery would take almost one year after the purchase. The products seem to be of good quality; however, the customer service has been the worst for this type of high-end products. In my previous experience, the more you pay, the better your customer experience. Here was utterly the opposite. In the end, I decided to...

The service is abysmal, don't come here.

I went here today ready to buy a Herman Miller chair, but I wanted to know more about the types of chairs, sizing, and why I should spend ~4x the price of typical office chairs to buy this chair.

When I walked in, I had to wander to find the store employees who were just chatting away without a care in the world. So I initiated saying I was interested in office chairs, they pointed me at a staircase and said they were upstairs and went back to their chatting.

So I wander around the chairs for a bit. It was so messy I couldn't even tell which chair was which. So I went downstairs again and asked for some help.

A very apathetic employee said she'd help. She then told me Herman Millers are good. I asked why and what makes them better than other chairs. "They just are". Okay, do they have anything special? "They're really adjustable. But so are all the other chairs" Okay...

I learned nothing about the chairs. A literal random stranger would be able to tell me more than the employees of this store.

Don't bother...

Yeah, so they should call this place "Design Within Reach for the 1%". Well, okay, not the 1%, but you get my drift. At the moment, it is definitely not within my reach but I hope it can be in the near future. It would be lovely to pop in and say, "I'll take the $410 Louis Ghost chair, put it on the Visa."

Anyway, I like the space here off University Ave and the service was friendly and accommodating. I seriously have been lusting after the Philip Starck Ghost chair for quite some time and although am not in a financial position to buy right now, thought I would entertain the possibility.

The affable saleslady and I looked at the chair in different lighting, scrutinized to see how easily the polycarbonate would scratch (turns out it would scratch very easily) and how comfy it is. On a similar topic, we ended up talking about the different types of scratching posts on the market, but I would not hesitate to come back here and buy the chair should I come into a windfall or if I ever decided that style is more...