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In May 2011 I purchased a piece of furniture from this company along with re-finishing services - and provided a deposit of 50%. It's now the middle of Jan 2012 and I'm still waiting for this to be finished. I was told back in Sept that it would be ready in one week. After many months of asking for a status, pictures, etc I requested a target date for completion, or return of my deposit via phone and e-mail, but those requests have been ignored by the owner, Dan Elman. I would be very careful dealing with this business. Unless you have the product purchased in hand I would not get involved with this company. I'll see him in small claims court.
I hope anyone reading this rant by Dan realizes he's a tough person to do business with. Most of it is false. I bought a buffet from him online - asked him to make a few repairs - and paint it white. After 7 months I had nothing - not even a picture. This isn't the Sistine Chapel - it's a small piece of furniture that I paid $500 for! In Jan, after him refusing to finish the project in the next week or return my deposit - I took him to small claims court. We both presented our case in front of a real judge - mine backed by hard evidence - his purely innuendo. He lost - he's mad - and this is how he takes his frustration out. BE CAREFUL!
The complaint has been investigated and resolved to the customer’s satisfaction.
in fact the judge actually said that if i had had prior notice of this happening (if you hadn't stolen my mail) and had been prepared with my evidence of the work that I did that she might have been able to find differently. Why are you driving one and a half hours past my house to another city to sue me for $500 more than you paid instead of showing up to pick your furniture up half a year prior? No, it's not the cistine chapel. So stop acting like a corrupt medieval pope.
Peter Ross is a liar. The sideboard was green. It was large. It was a complete rebuild from the ground up, including structure- I have photos of all of this. I still have all of the documents proving everything I have said above is 100% accurate, including numerous emails where I specifically told him he was asking too soon & not giving enough time to do the work. I even saved his voicemail confirming pickup on December 15th. He was a no-call, no-show. I didn't hear from him again until mid January when I discovered him harassing my mother on her own business listing. The guy is a super creep. I have a huge following that constantly tells me how nice, generous and friendly I am, and how great my customer service is. I just don't handle harassment, bullying and pushy people well. Scamming me with a double refund demand after the fact just takes the cake. That right there proves my case. I have your email Pete. You asked for the refund twice. The court and the judge told you NO, even though I was not allowed to present my side of the case in court. I handed my documents to the judge, and she refused to take them. You gave her a book of emails with your email address blacked out on every page. You either lie or you have a terrible memory. I did take my frustration out above, and I also warned people how difficult YOU are to do business with. All you had to do was wait until I emailed you back the finished pics and then show up to your appointment. You couldn't do that. You are a control freak who had to mico-manage everything. You skipped the pickup because you couldn't control it, and then you waited another month to cancel the order. Then you took your frustrations out by stealing my mail and scamming me for more money than you paid. I even have in writing from an attorney that what you did was fraud. I would happily show my documents to anyone who asked. I can prove you were scamming.
The person who left the original complaint here turned out to be a scammer. I knew something did not fit right! It took a courtroom battle to get to the bottom of it. Peter Ross aka Pete0502 who left the above complaint stole my mail in an effort to get a bogus default judgment against me behind my back, without my knowledge, by suing me for more than twice what he paid, and then trying to get a judgment before I knew about it.
He already knew I had moved to another state, and he knew both the product and I were there, where he had had an appointment to pick it up and never showed up. yet he actually traveled from CT to PA, where I no longer lived, to sign for the mail that he himself sent me at my old apartment!
The whole thing turned out to be nothing more than a creditcard scam. Peter Ross jerked me around, hacked my computer and e-mail (he works in IT I discovered) for the better part of 6 months just to scam a few hundred bucks out of me!
He violated federal law by stealing my mail. The man is a creep.
He had made an appointment in mid December to pick up this piece of furniture, and he never showed up. I was waiting there to hand him his money back just to get rid of him at that time! He had called me back to "confirm" it after I had already called him back and confirmed it, just to harass me. HIS WORDS on my voicemail "This is Peter Ross calling to harass you again"
Yet we go to court, and he denies the whole thing! Court docs heavily redacted where he crossed out any reference to his e-mail and his computer in an effort to cover up. I had already traced the IP addresses back to his home and his employer. Then he tried to get $500 more than he had paid me. Luckily I found out about it, showed up to the court to put a stop to it, and the court did not give in to his scam.
He also covered up and excluded the fact that he already received a product that I made and shipped to him a year prior. So the judge was left in the dark that I had provided him with service and product, and was led to believe that he got "nothing" and it was a year (which it was not, as he was invited to come get it or his money 6 months prior to that, and he did receive custom made goods from me the previous June!) It was a complete circus!
Since I did not have the court documents that he stole from my mail, I was unable to thoroughly review them and point out what was missing to the judge. Long story short, I gave up and gave him back his money just to get rid of the guy. The judge refused his ridiculous claim for 500 dollars.
BUT even after the hearing, I demanded that he give me my property back before I would give him dime #1, and finally he did. He had promised me that he would send it back months prior, and he never did. Now that it's all over and I have had a few months to cool off and gain perspective, I am ready to tell my story and am preparing my own complaint against the con artist Peter Ross exposing him for the fraud that he is. I have filed a complaint with the postal inspector against Peter Ross for mail fraud and theft and waiting to hear back.
Even more incredible than all of this is that even after I caved in and refunded him the original payment I knew I did not owe him, after he finally returned my property, he had the audacity to give me some preposterous claim about not having his original account number from the payment and needing me to repay him the money a second time by check! He literally wanted a double refund after I already did the work. I called the court, and they told me to just ignore him.
That's right! The guy got his $ back, finally got his way, and tried to scam me out of the same money all over again. Peter Ross pete0502 is a crook, pure and simple. I actually feel better after that hearing, because it exposed this complaint for the ridiculous charade that it really is.
That's completely preposterous.
I have never become irritated or irate at someone for simply asking about the details of a transaction. The typical response I get from a consumer when asking about product details for the first time is how much time and extra effort I put into it, and how nice & accommodating I am with it.
Your aunt would have to have had a really bad attitude, been insulting, or pushed my buttons in some similar fashion. I have always had a reputation of extreme diplomacy and helpful nature. I treat every customer and potential client with the utmost respect and attention, and I have received a lot of positive feedback on my attentiveness to customer's questions and needs. I have a file of thank you e-mails several hundred messages deep attesting to this. My reputation is one of going far above and beyond the call of duty for all of my customers, as is evidenced by the above, original "complaint".
In fact I spend half of every year filling orders for return customers.
Is your aunt the one in California who mistook the shipping cost for the entire cost of the finished, delivered product, and then rudely insinuated I was "raising" my price? It was extremely insulting of her to ignore her own obvious error and to try to pass it off onto me as some kind of scam wrongdoing.
If you come around here accusing me of inflating shipping prices (which I almost always take a loss on to begin with) to mask your own ineptitude, you will be asked kindly to take your business elsewhere. There is a difference between treating customers respectfully, attentively, and maintaining your own self-respect.
Your aunt could have simply replied with an apology, saying how silly it was of her to have misunderstood something so clearly stated, or that she misread my response. It was highly inappropriate of her to write me back and accuse me of changing the price on her, which simply never happened and didn't even make any sense. Why don't you look at the actual exchange with your aunt, if it is in fact the one I believe it mus be, because I have not had a negative conversation with any other customers at all this year, and check the actual wording and numbers. Your aunt read what she wanted to hear, instead of what I told her clearly, and then became embarrassed at her error.
While browsing for a complaint about another furniture company I saw this thread. I thought I recognized the name Kitsch-n-Kaboodle. I have never bought anything from Dan Elman or his company Kitsch-n-Kaboodle, but my aunt was going too till she started to question him about some of the finer details. He became irritated and irritate and after reading this i guess the warning should be if you like or want to purchase a piece dont talk give an opinion or dare be dissatisfied.
FICTION. This is a bogus complaint.
There is no delivery for this order. It's a pick-up order, where the consumer is responsible for all of the transportation arrangements. And those can only be made after the piece is completely finished. Until then, there is no one-week delivery date.
This is not a furniture purchase- this is custom furniture, which includes artistic decoration and design, part of which the client did not confirm until July, and the latter part of which he never confirmed at all. The craftsman was instructed to spend extra time experimenting with and designing the last stages himself, as well as designing extra options beyond what is normal for a standard order in the early stages.
Record shows the client extended the initial 2 months of design process himself experimenting and deciding on color/finish options. The time-frame of this kind of order changes as the design evolves. This order is completely within normal time-frame at the time of posting of the above "complaint".
A July through January time-frame is completely normal for custom furniture- read the business website, from 2 to 12 months, and the workshop is closed in Sept. The poor craftsman is already breaking his own rules and spending his vacation time on this man's order. He's bending over backward. Client has a lot of nerve complaining about this.
As for September, when he asked, he did not request a shipment deadline- it is impossible to have done that since it goes against the terms of the agreement. There are no delivery deadlines on this kind of order, and no promise of delivery at all while the work and design is not yet completed. It's an artistic process that goes under the timeframe "it's done when it's done" with a posted miminum of 2 months, to allow for the artistic process and development of the design, with any changes the client makes along the way.
In this case the design process was not even completed. The business did not give a delivery date. That is completely false. It appears as though the client is libeling this business in a continued effort to harass and extort extra services out of him, in an effort to force him to work faster. This is known in the business as "rush-harassment" and is a common problem plaguing the custom home design industry.
Client specifically asked in July how much work was left on the finish and construction portion of the order- not when it would be "delivered"- and the business informed him of how many man-hours of labor remained to be completed for that portion of the order. The craftsman stated an estimate only of what he expected under the conditions at that time. It's not a delivery deadline.
It's clearly stated as an estimate for how much labor was left in that stage, not what date he would definitely receive it. It was not a promise or guarantee of any kind, merely a courtesy estimate reflecting progress.
There is also mention at that time of a lack of direction or approval of the hardware choices from the client. The client was reluctant to complete the details of design for the order. It was left to the craftsman's discretion to spend extra time experimenting and designing that himself, in lieu of clear direction from the client.
Additionally, the client was not only told he could cancel it in the fall if he did not want to wait, but he was actually encouraged to do so on several occasions- the phrasing and wording from the business to this Pete person, offering cancellation appears numerous times in the order history.
Pete0502 continued to ignore those offers, and instead has been inappropriately harassing the craftsman via telephone, e-mail, and cyber terrorism thug tactics of spam and website interference. It is not his right or his place to rush the craftsman and force him to work faster against his ability or will. And this kind of behavior is completely inappropriate regardless of anything the craftsman did or did not complete.
The client was also informed that the craftsman doing the work suffers from acute sinusitis related to a congenital health defect during the fall season. There are many references in correspondence to the craftsman's illness, and the need for flexibility as a result. Pete ignored those too, and continued to press him to work faster while he was ill. Shameful behavior from this client.
Industry standards- it's not uncommon for the best craftsman to have longer wait times, for example over a year for one chair seat at an upholsterer. And the best chair caner in the region has a minimum 6-month wait before he will even start a job. This client only confirmed the initial details of the order in July. It's just not even a long time-frame.
Client is being pushy, impatient and not waiting long enough. The business both offered fair terms to exit the contract, as well as informing in advance of order and during the process about time-frame and availability, and offering right to cancel. He needs to accept that the craftsman also has a right to cancel if he is this insufferable and threatens the craftman's life and livelihood, whether direct or indirect. The fact that he is in here falsely accusing him of non-delivery of something he's not supposed to deliver is reason enough for him to quit the job, which he has every right to do.
Pete needs to go back and read original invoice, which specifically says at the bottom "DUE DATE: on completion" as well as clearly stating that there is no delivery included in order, as well as clearing stating that the terms and policies from the website on which he ordered were part of the agreement. He contacted the business from those very same terms and policies to begin with- that is how he knew to contact the business and place the order. He can't just ignore them after the fact and expect to simply get his way via means thug tactics of harassment.
It also warns on the website that the deposit covers the craftsman's pay for his initial consultation and design services for the first stages of the project only, provided to him in JULY. He received service already, and to take back the money he paid is a breach of contract and failure of consideration for what the craftsman already provided to him. He has not paid for the finished piece of furniture yet, and any independent contractor has a right to quit a job if the client's behavior becomes an issue. The deposit does not give the client complete control over the craftsman or the power to boss him about.
Then when the business offered to pick up the job again and furnish it, the client "protested" accepting the piece and paying the final bill. (his exact words- "I protest")
Client needs to grow up.
Client doesn't pay attention, throws temper-tantrums when he can't get his immediate gratification. Does this look like a fast-food-drive-thru?
Kitsch-n-kaboodle is not a corporation. It's one person- an artist, by himself, in a tiny hovel of a workshop, on a shoe-string budget, balancing a health condition for which there is no cure with a craft that takes enormous physical endurance. If the man cannot breath at the time you ask, he does not have to work for you just because you demand it, and not because you pay his deposit. For you to order him around, you need to hire him full-time. As an independent contractor, he has a right to quit, and a right to name the timing of the order, including changes necessitated by either the work or health. As the client, if you don't like the job or the process, you quit the project. If you don't want to wait until the man can complete the order safely and comfortably, on a contract without deadlines as per your original agreement, then you should not have continued to harass and press him for it months after he offered to cancel it for you.
Pete0502 has no complaint. He has only his own bad behavior to blame. And the business has repeated offered to take up the project again and complete it, provided the client fully accept the craftsmans terms, curb his behavior, and pay the bill in full.