Customers of an Auckland window covering company say they’ve been left feeling like they’re “living in a fishbowl”, without the products they ordered for their homes.
Nearly a dozen people have complained to Fair Go about Kiwi Window Furnishings (KWF) after paying deposits for shutters, curtains or blinds that were either faulty or never showed up.
Auckland couple Craig Clark and Jenny Stronge paid a $6000 deposit to the company in June 2022. They were told their shutters would take up to 16 weeks to arrive. By October, they were left waiting and wondering, as they had difficulty getting hold of KWF staff about their order.
KWF went into receivership in October 2022. A month and a half later, it was out of receivership but that didn't help customers like Craig and Jenny, who were then told by the company that their shutters were locked away by KWF’s shutter supplier under it was paid in full.
KWF’s contract stipulates that final payment by its customers is due on installation. The couple said they offered to pay the remaining amount into a holding account, but say KWF’s owner, Vijay Bhosale, wouldn’t agree to this.
Many customers expressed to Fair Go how difficult it was to get hold of staff at KWF and they also had trouble finding the company’s physical location.
The company’s website claimed to have a showroom on Auckland’s North Shore as well as a factory where it made curtain and blinds, but the address it used was actually the site of another business.
Beaut Curtain had been supplying Kiwi Window Furnishings with materials and says the use of a similar address was “totally unacceptable”.
Beaut Curtain has now relocated. It doesn't do business with KWF anymore, saying the company owes it more than $50,000.
Kiwi Window Furnishing’s owner Vijay Bhosale says the reason the Wairau address was still on his company’s website was due to the cost of making the changes, which was made more difficult in receivership. He says the company’s latest address in Howick is displayed on customer quotes.
“We have not advertised or we have not pushed for more business, because we're just cleaning up what's in-house,” Vijay told Fair Go.
The website has now been updated to an address in Howick, Auckland.
Vijay says his company is “trying to do right by all our clients”.
He admits some mistakes were made with KWF’s finances and its communication with customers.
But he blames his shutter supplier for the hold ups, saying “the supplier has stopped our account and they won't release any further product or process any further orders”.
When asked about his company obligations to its own customers, Vijay gave an assurance that “any contracts that we fulfil, we refunding them either in part payment or in full”.
Fair Go spoke with one shutter supplier, Shutter Studio, which told the programme KWF owes it more than $9000 and that some products were taken from its workshop without being paid for.
Vijay said he couldn’t comment further due to “disputed invoices” but said there were problems with products from Shutter Studio and Beaut Curtain.
Both suppliers told Fair Go when there were issues, they either fixed them or knocked it off the price. But they say they still weren't paid.
Vijay says his company remains committed to refunding clients and remedying the shortcomings.
Of all the customers Fair Go has spoken to over the course of its investigation, a few were paid back a small amount of money. None have received any payments since the programme contacted Kiwi Window Furnishings nearly five weeks ago.
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