If you’ve ever browsed our showroom or visited our website and stumbled upon the Individual Furniture Series, you’ve likely noticed what sets it apart: it’s not mass-produced, it’s built to order, and every piece bears the signature of the craftsman who built it. Over the years, I’ve fielded hundreds of questions from customers, and one of the most consistent is this: Can I return the Individual Furniture Series if I’m not satisfied? As someone who’s spent 18 years running this small, family-owned furniture supply operation, I don’t answer this with a generic script. I answer it with the values we built this business on: transparency, respect for the craft, and treating customers like neighbors, not transaction numbers. Let me walk you through exactly how this works—what’s fair, what’s possible, and why we can’t make exceptions for every scenario, because honoring the craftsman who built the piece is non-negotiable. Individual Furniture Series
First, let’s pull back the curtain on what makes the Individual Furniture Series different from the big-box store furniture you’re used to seeing. Most furniture you buy online or at chain stores is made in a factory, assembled from pre-cut parts, and shipped to a warehouse before it hits your living room. Each piece is the same as the next, and if it’s damaged or not what you wanted, sending it back is just a matter of dropping it in a box and mailing it off. The Individual Furniture Series? No assembly lines, no pre-cut panels, no duplicates. Every order is initiated after a consultation with you: we’ll talk about the size of your space, the style you’re drawn to—whether it’s the reclaimed oak side table with the live edge, the mid-century walnut credenza with soft-closing drawers, or the hand-stitched leather sofa with a custom cushion fill. Once you confirm the details, our lead craftsman (a third-generation woodworker, by the way) sources the exact material you picked, works on the piece in our small workshop for 40 to 80 hours, and takes photos at every step to send to you for approval. That piece is then crated by hand, loaded onto a dedicated delivery truck (not a big-rig that drops 50 pieces a day), and dropped off at your door, where our two-person delivery team will even unpack it, set it where you want it, and haul away all the packaging.
This is why our return policy isn’t the same as what you’d get from a big retailer. When we build an Individual Furniture Series piece, we don’t just use materials—we dedicate 40+ hours of a skilled craftsman’s time to a product that was made for you, not for a general stock. If we returned that piece, we couldn’t sell it to another customer, because it’s tailored to your exact specifications: a 72-inch credenza instead of a standard 60-inch, a custom stain that matched your existing hardwood floor, or a leather color we special-ordered just for your order. That’s not a flaw—it’s the point of the series. But that doesn’t mean we’re inflexible. We’ve built a policy over the years that balances fairness to you, fairness to our craftsmen, and fairness to the care that goes into every piece.
Let’s break down the scenarios I actually get asked about most, to make this clear. The first, and most common, is I received my Individual Furniture Series piece and it’s damaged in transit. That’s the scenario where we will absolutely 100% take it back, no questions asked. Our delivery team is trained to inspect every piece before they leave, and if you notice a scratch, a dent, or a structural issue when they’re setting it up, we take photos right there, send the piece back to our workshop at no cost to you, and our craftsman will either repair it to match the original or build an entirely new piece from scratch. We’ve only had 12 damage incidents in 18 years, and every single one has been resolved within two weeks, no extra costs to the customer. That’s the easy call, because damage in transit is never your fault, and our delivery process is something we take full responsibility for.
The second scenario, and the tricky one, is I love the design but it doesn’t look right in my home—what I call the “eye for space” issue. You pick out a gorgeous reclaimed coffee table, but when it shows up in your living room, it feels too small next to your sectional, or the stain looks darker than you thought it would under your overhead lighting. This is the scenario that most people think we just say “no” to, but that’s not true—we have a process here. Here’s how it works: within 14 days of delivery, if you’re not happy, you can reach out to our customer care team, and we’ll send a small team to your home to assess the piece, pack it up, and bring it back to our workshop. But here’s the fine print: because that piece was made specifically for your order (for example, it’s a 48-inch table instead of a standard 42-inch), we can’t refund 100% of the cost. We cover the cost of delivering it to you and picking it up, but we have to deduct the cost of the custom materials and the craftsman’s time spent building a piece that doesn’t work for you. That deduction is usually between 15% and 20% of the total cost—far less than our competitors would charge, I might add. And if you’d like, we can also work with you to adjust the piece to fit your space: if it’s too small, our craftsman can extend it; if the stain is too dark, we can re-stain it for a small additional fee. This isn’t a “gotcha” policy—it’s how we make sure the craftsman who spent 60 hours building your piece doesn’t take a loss on work that, for whatever reason, didn’t end up fitting your home.
Now, the scenario that’s even rarer, but I still get it: I changed my mind before you built the piece. If you decide to cancel your order before the craftsman starts working, that’s no problem at all—we’ll issue a full refund, no questions asked. We know that life happens: you might have a roommate move in, you might need to downsize your space, you might find a different style you love more. But if you cancel after the craftsman has already cut the wood or started building, then we can’t offer a full refund, because we’ve already put materials and labor into a piece that we can’t resell. In that case, we’d refund between 70% and 80% of the total cost, and you can keep the piece if you’d like, or we can ship it to a different customer if we find someone who wants the exact same design. That’s a fair balance, too—we can’t ask our craftsman to waste half a day’s work on a piece that’s going to sit in our workshop forever, but we don’t want to leave you out of pocket for a mistake that was as much ours as yours.
I also want to be clear about what we will not accept as a reason for a return. We won’t take back a piece that you’ve used, scratched, or damaged yourself—scratches on leather, dents on wood, tears in upholstery—because that’s fair wear and tear, and that piece won’t be salable to another customer. We also won’t take back a piece that you ordered standard size, built to be a side table, and then tried to use as a dining table, because that’s misusing a piece that was built for a specific purpose. And we won’t take back a piece that was built with materials you selected—you picked the reclaimed barn wood, the distressed leather, the custom stain—and now decided you don’t like it, because that’s a decision you made after working with our team to pick exactly what you wanted. We’ve had a handful of customers try to return a piece after six months, claiming “it doesn’t match my decor,” and that’s just not something we can accommodate. The Individual Furniture Series is meant to be a long-term investment, not a throwaway piece you swap out every year, so we need customers who are willing to put in the time to pick the right piece for their home, not just impulse buy and return.
Over the years, we’ve refined this policy because we’ve learned from our mistakes. Early on, we tried offering full refunds for any return, and we lost money on two orders where customers changed their mind after the craftsman had already spent 50 hours building. We also tried offering no returns at all, and we lost three great customers who were worried about ordering a custom piece sight unseen. The policy we landed on now is a middle ground that works for everyone: it gives you the flexibility to adjust if something goes wrong, it compensates our craftsmen for their skilled work, and it keeps the Individual Furniture Series true to what it is—custom, hand-built furniture that’s meant to last a lifetime.
I know that ordering custom furniture online can feel scary. You can’t touch the wood before you buy it, you can’t sit on the sofa to test the comfort, you’re putting your money into a piece that’s built just for you. That’s why we’re always happy to answer questions before you order: we’ll send you more photos of the material, we’ll share videos of our craftsmen working on past pieces, we’ll even connect you with a past customer who ordered the exact piece you’re looking at, so you can hear about their experience. We know that trust is everything when you’re ordering something that’s not on a shelf in a store.
If you’re interested in learning more about the Individual Furniture Series, or if you have a question about a specific order, we’d love to hear from you. Whether you’re not sure if the size will fit, you want to adjust a custom detail, or you’re wondering about our return process for a piece you already ordered, our team is here to help. We don’t do automated customer service lines or generic emails—you’ll talk to a real person who works in the workshop, who knows our craftsmen, who has spent years building these pieces, and who will give you honest, straightforward answers.
At the end of the day, the Individual Furniture Series is built on three things: skill, transparency, and respect for the people who buy our work. We treat our craftsmen with fair wages and respect for their time, and we treat our customers with the same honesty we’d want for ourselves. So to answer the question that started this whole blog post: Yes, you can return the Individual Furniture Series if you’re not satisfied—but not in the way you might expect. It’s not a hassle-free return like a t-shirt you bought online; it’s a process that takes into account the care and work that goes into every piece, and that puts both you and the craftsman first. That’s the standard we’ve built, and that’s the standard we’ll keep, for as long as we build furniture here.
Floor Tiles References:
- American Home Furnishings Alliance. (2022). Custom and Hand-Built Furniture: Consumer Expectations and Industry Standards.
- National Association of Furniture Craftsmen. (2021). Balancing Customer Satisfaction and Artisan Labor in Custom Furniture Policies.
- Small Business Administration. (2020). Fair Return Policies for Custom Handmade Products: A Guide for Small Artisan Businesses.
- Interior Design Association. (2023). The Value of Custom Furniture: Why Specially Built Pieces Require Flexible, Fair Consumer Policies.
Shanghai Dishan Xiumei Railing Manufacturing Co., Ltd.
Address: No. 2568 Xiangyanghe Road, Qingpu District, Shanghai
E-mail: 13524911319@163.com
WebSite: https://www.dsxmoutdoorliving.com/
