Appalling experience from Darlings of Chelsea Enough time has passed for this review to be written in a non-emotive manner. We saw an amazing sofa within Darlings of Chelsea’s clearance section – 6 stunning, crisp photos. Tick! But we’re old enough to realise that clearance means ‘potential issue’ so we reviewed the condition box; ‘good condition’ it stated. Tick! As a final check we phoned the Ash Vale showroom. ‘It’s in great condition – looks like a cancelled customer order’ said their representative. 3 ticks! Wow we thought – visually great, descriptively good - both verbally confirmed. Let’s order! What a mistake. We were advised as to a delivery date the afternoon before, which was ridiculously short notice but thankfully we were in. When the sofa arrived our faces dropped. There were about 20-25 dark marks on the sofa; both ends, back, seat and scatter cushions, all visible from at least 15 feet away. One in particular was deep, black and approximately 15cm x 10 cm – looked amazing on cream fabric!!! ‘Here’s a cleaning kit’ said the delivery men. WHAT???? Numerous emails and phone calls followed, culminating in a formal complaint raised later in the afternoon. ‘We have people who clean sofas and we’ll get back to you within 24-48hrs’ said the representative. Guess what? No phone call, here we chase again. It took phoning HQ in Birmingham to speak to someone with a customer focus. It transpires that there is no cleaning availability (which does make sense but hopes dashed again). Following an internal investigation the sale photos originated from a formal photo shoot rather than the actual item for sale. Rather naughty for an item in a clearance section…………….. To be fair to Darlings they offered a refund within a couple of hours of delivery and that’s what we accepted. The sofa has been collected and our transaction cancelled. But the misinformation (we can clean it for you), the lack of initial ownership / customer service and an inability to return phone calls meant we had the most awful experience over the past 4 days. Simply, how can a sofa leave in such a condition? I’m sure DoC will respond to this review and rightfully they should. Simply putting their hands up and saying ‘yeah we got that badly wrong’ would suffice.