Making Furniture Incompetently (MFI)

Member Name: dave27

Product:	MFI
Date:	07/10/01 (491 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Range, Prices

Disadvantages: Crap quality

MFI ... say the letters with apprehension and a tremble ... up comes a breeze and you can hear the doors shake as cheap and nasty hinges start to pop ... MFI ... synonymous with crap furniture which you put together yourself and then spend six months regretting ever seeing, let alone taking home in those very unpleasant flat packs ... God, we'll have some fun with this one...

Before we enter Big Yuk City, however, let's just give you some background reading for your homework and what MFI think of themselves.

You can check out MFI (if you really want to, but I can't think why you would do) at http://www.mfigroup.co.uk/ where they provide you with all sorts of information which may have convinced you that this is quite a wonderful and high quality organisation ... if you didn't know the ghastly truth, that is ...

MFI were formed in 1964 when Noel Lister and Donald Searle created a company called (snappily enough) Mullard Furniture Industries. They had separately made a career out of buying up and then selling on surplus stock and decided to form a jointly owned company, based originally in Edgware, North London. The Mullard, incidentally, came from Searle's wife's maiden name (Shame her first name was Arthur....)

Lister and Searle (a fine pair of comedians) decided that they should capitalise on a market niche for flat pack furniture which they sold via mail order.

They started making a name for themselves in the furniture trade and in 1971 MFI Warehouses got a Stock Exchange listing, before starting to bring in external management experience. They decided to move away from their mail order specialism and opened a purpose built distribution centre at Bedford in 1976, before extending their range of products in 1977. They improved quality and design (so they say, although I remain strictly unconvinced by their claims) and started to focus on kitchen and bedroom furniture.

In the 80's,
along with many large firms, MFI started to increase in size by buying up other organisations and opening new showrooms. In 1982, they made a smart move by securing control of the Hygena brand and exploiting it for all it was worth. Hygena had been a well known name in the market for around 50 years and was an excellent addition to their armoury. The growth by acquisition mushroomed in 1985 when MFI joined forces with ASDA (Associated Dairies) to become a major UK retailer, also branching out into kitchen and bedroom consulting, design and fitting.

Strangely, the tie up with ASDA only lasted a couple of years before MFI's management took the company over via a buyout and went into superstores as a way of further expanding before acquiring Schreiber Furniture in 1988. Things went full circle again by 1992, when they were floated as a public company again.


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Okay, school lesson finished, let's start telling you about the dave27 experience...

The dave27 clan's first experience of MFI was shortly after we got married in 1983 and Mrs D insisted on buying some wardrobes, frogmarching me down to the local MFI to see their wares. We bought some which I thought were exorbitantly priced, but then I'm tightness personified and anything above a fiver is rich to me. I couldn't drive back then and Mrs D took the wheel of the little MFI van to drive our purchase home. She was totally awful, but that's nothing new.

That first set of wardrobes lasted for ages, even though they were pretty flimsy. It was a bloody good job that we got a professional to fit them, because dave27 and DIY are strictly off limits to each other, for reasons which will soon become clear.

Like all MFI wardrobes, they looked quite elegant and strong from the front, but the back was made out of hardboard and attached via panel pins and they had a nasty habit of wobbling from side to side (Very like
Mrs D, in fact).

Moving on some five or six years, when we moved back to Stafford from a while spent Dahn Sarf, we needed a new wardrobe and sought out MFI again, but this time Mrs D trusted me and my newly purchased power drill to do the biz.

Look, before we start the next bit, let me make it perfectly clear that the instructions were not very clear and did not say how many holes to drill, okay, they just said drill out the holes. So, of course, I drilled a hole where all the markings were, some thirty two I seem to remember and, in Mrs D's words, it "looked like it had got woodworm" or "The Mafia had been practicing on it" when I'd finished. Still it was sturdy enough and we managed to flog it on when we'd had our use of it to a mate, who seemed to appreciate the modifications I'd made.

Okay, now let's move on about a decade, to a couple of months ago, in fact, when Mrs D was looking to buy a new wardrobe for Lewis and we searched out MFI once more. We managed to find a wardrobe which we were both happy with (Yes, I know it's extremely rare that we agree on anything, so you can understand why we were about to flash the plastic). The wardrobe was quite expensive, about £200, but we were prepared to go that far because as I say we'd agreed on it.

However, when the sales assistant (sorry, Customer Services Adviser and Assistant Showroom Supervisor) told us that we had to order it because they didn't carry stock, and that it would take three weeks to deliver, well, Mrs D saw red and told them exactly where they could stick it, and it sure wasn't in Lewis' bedroom.

On the whole, MFI fill quite an important place in the bedroom and kitchen furniture market, being generally reasonably priced and of OK quality, but I can only say that in our experience, the stuff doesn't last any great time and you'd be far better advised to spend a bit more and get somethi
ng that's better built. You could go to MFI, but be it on your own heads ... quite literally, if you don't tighten those screws enough!

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