Welcome to Deskwell: Furniture for Businesses That Have Better Things to Do

Most people buying office furniture in the UK have no wish to become experts in it. They run a business, they need eight desks and eight chairs before the new starters arrive, and they would happily hand the whole job to somebody else. That is who Deskwell is for.

We saw this trade from the inside and did not much like the way it worked. Prices bent to suit whoever was asking. Dimensions and weight ratings kept off the page so you had to ring in for them. Advice built around whatever needed shifting that month. Buying a desk turned into homework, and homework eats the time you were meant to spend running the place.

Buying office furniture in the UK without the homework

So we did the obvious thing and put everything on the page. Sizes, materials, fabric grades, weight limits, what arrives flat and what turns up built. If we can find it out, you can read it.

That takes longer at our end. Somebody has to chase the supplier for the numbers, check them and type them up, and some suppliers are better at answering than others. It is worth the bother, because it means you can compare two chairs at eleven at night without booking a call with anyone.

It also changes what the questions look like when they do reach us. Nobody rings to ask how wide the desk is any more. They ring to ask whether the 1600 will still leave room to get past the radiator, which is a far better use of everybody's afternoon.

One price for all

Every price on the site is the same price for every business. One chair or forty, a startup in a spare room or a company spread over three floors: same number. Nobody gets sized up on the phone. You will not find a call for pricing button anywhere in our office desks range, because we have never heard a good reason for one.

Orders come direct from our suppliers to your door. That skips a warehouse in the middle, which keeps the price sensible and the lead times honest. When something is three weeks away, we say three weeks.

None of this is clever. It is the arrangement most people assume they are getting already, right up until the quote arrives and turns out to be different from the one their neighbour was given for the same chair.

We are still here after the van leaves

The other half of the job starts after delivery. Castors wear out. Somebody loses the allen key. A company grows and needs four more of the same desk in the same finish two years on, by which point nobody can remember what the finish was called. We keep a record of what we sold you, so that call is a short one.

If you want a hand planning the space before you buy, ask. We will draw up a layout for one desk or a whole floor, so you know it fits before anything goes on a lorry.

What to expect from the Gazette

This is where the rest of it lives. Buying guides that get to the point, notes on how we are building the shop, and the odd opinion about office layout that you are welcome to disagree with.

Marcus will talk you through what separates a good office chair from a regrettable one. Sarah writes about the parts of an office people feel rather than read about. Emma knows more about delivery days than anyone reasonably should. Ben builds the site and will happily explain why the pages load before your tea goes cold.

Have a look round. If something is missing from a product page, tell us and we will go and find it. That is rather the point of the whole exercise.