Exclusive Italian Furniture of the worst quality and guarantee

<p>Six years ago we decided to get a genuine leather lounge suite as an investment. After shopping around for weeks, we found Steel-land in Observatory. We were told that it is an exclusive, Italian handmade product and that we have a 15year guarantee on the suite. Now that the suite has issues, things are not the same.</p> <p>The leather (supposed to be genuine high quality leather) is peeling and underneath you can see a material normally found underneath vinyl. So our genuine leather is not genuine. Now it ends up being "top grain leather".  Regarding the 15 year guarantee, the company has changed that to a lousy 1 year. And now we hear that the suite only has a guarantee on the framework and not on the leather.</p> <p>When we originally purchased it, we were also told that they keep records of their clients as part of this exclusive brand's service. I'm genarally a collector of appliance boxes and invoices, but after we moved a couple of months ago, I haven't been able to find numerous things. This 6 year old invoice happens to be one of those things. Now we are told by the new salesman, we can't claim as we don't have the invoice. There's only one Steel-Land distributor in SA so where else could we've gotten the suite from? </p> <p>So we paid R16k for an exclusive, Italian, supposed to be real leather, with a 15 year guarantee on the entire suite that looks like a mess because the "leather" is peeling. There's no records of us and the guarantee dropped by 14 years. Should tell you a lot about the workmanship if you dropped it with that much.</p> <p>I won't recommend this brand to anyone. Although it looks amazing at first, it's not an investment. You'll only be left with an expensive repair you'll have to pay someone else to fix.</p>