What Happened to Brooksrattangardenfurniture.co.uk?

Last Updated on November 29, 2022

Rattan garden furniture is incredibly popular today. It complements the majority of landscape ideas and has a chic, modern appearance. Also, it is weatherproof with the right finish and can be used as permanent fixtures for your patio or decking, for example. Due to its popularity, you can find many online stores dedicated to the sale of rattan furniture. 

One such successful website was Brooks Rattan Garden Furniture. This article looks at what this company did and ultimately what happened to Brooksrattangardenfurniture.co.uk. 

Brooks Rattan Garden Furniture – Who Were They?

Brooks Rattan Garden Furniture was established in Romford, Essex. The business was lodged at Companies House to Director Paul Brightman. It appears that the company had an extensive online store which was responsible for most of their sales, and also two different showrooms.

The showrooms were located in Romford, Essex, and Laindon, Essex. The business must have seen great success in running two showrooms and an online store. Indeed, you can see numerous ratings and reviews on platforms like Google Places and TrustPilot.

It was engaged in the retail of rattan garden furniture. Rattan is a type of vine that can be weaved and thatched to make stylish and durable furniture. It is an excellent material for outdoor use as it is hard-wearing, tough, and long-lasting – perfect for any garden. The company sold a huge range of rattan furniture, including full seating sets and single items like chairs, stools, and tables.

What Could You Find at the Brooksrattangardenfurniture.co.uk Website?

The Brooks Rattan Garden Furniture website was quite modern and had a great design. It featured clear navigation with various product categories and plenty of advertisements for their showrooms, offers, and customer support. 

The website had a fully functional online store that included account management, secure payments, and a dedicated customer login section. It also had clear terms for all aspects of the order process, including deliveries, payments, and returns. Regardless of the negative TrustPilot reviews (discussed below), the company appeared to have a professional site that made purchasing garden furniture easy.

You can only view the website using the Wayback Machine web archive tool as it is no longer active. In the following sections, we look at what you could find on this website:

Different Product Categories

Brooks Rattan had an extensive range of rattan furniture for sale, which was split into distinct categories, including:

• Ranges
• Dining
• Cubes
• Sofa sets
• Corner sofas
• Day beds
• Loungers
• Conservatory

The Ranges section filtered the product by the specific type of rattan or the design. This included Brown Mixed Chocolate Weave, Black Onyx Weave, Windsor Weave, Ivory Weave, and Serena Grey Weave. This allowed you to easily find different products that would match.

Alternatively, you could search through the categories to find anything from dining tables and chairs to loungers and even large corner sofas. They appeared to have an excellent choice, and they also offered some useful delivery features such as same-day dispatch if you ordered before 14:00.

Many products also came with a guarantee of five or even ten years. However, the guarantee appeared to be a bone of contention. As you will see below, it is unclear if Brooks Rattan honoured this guarantee.

Blog

The Brooks Rattan website also had a dedicated blog. This section was not maintained, and it only had one entry. It appears that this was not an important section of the website. The only blog entry was on the 8th of July 2015. This simple introductory entry explained a little history about the company and that they had over 30 years of experience in rattan garden furniture.

My Account

Customers could also utilise their My Account section. This area allowed you to manage your orders, check on the progress of current orders, look at your order history, and more. You could also use it to change your delivery address and update payment information.

The website appeared to have an excellent and secure payment system. They accepted Visa, MasterCard, Visa Debit, and Maestro. Also, payment transactions were secured via PaymentSecure.

Shipping of orders was only available for mainland UK customers – they offered no international deliveries. The shipping page provides full details of delivery terms, which seemed quite strict. For example, if the delivery had to be rescheduled for any reason, you were charged £39. Also, the company reserved the right to cancel orders at any time if deliveries were unsuccessful.

Why Did This Website Stop Operating?

After extensive research, it was easy to see what happened to Brooksrattangardenfurniture.co.uk. A simple web search for this website shows their TrustPilot rating, which is pretty poor at 2.5 out of 5, and if you read the four most recent reviews, you can see a recurring theme. Customers points towards non-existent customer service, poor quality of the rattan garden furniture, and the lack of support for the supposed 10-year guarantee offered.

One customer also points towards this company dissolving and simply trading under a different name. Indeed, if we look at Companies House accounting records, we can see that the Brooks Rattan Garden Furniture was indeed dissolved. 

In its place, we have the new website and company Rattan Garden Furniture Ltd. This company is currently active and is essentially the same website but with an overhauled design, a new company name, and a new logo. They still sell the same products and operate showrooms in Romford, Surrey.

Looking at the TrustPilot reviews, it is possible that Brooks Rattan Garden Furniture was dissolved to avoid backlash from the 10-year guarantee situation and from having to reimburse disgruntled customers. This may not be the case, but the reviews and negative press surrounding the original company would point towards this reason. On the other hand, the owners may simply have wanted to re-brand the company and give it a more generic name that should perform better with SEO and Google SERPs.