Avoid at all costs.
We bought our frameless glass channel through Origin, there were no problems with that purchase. All was well.
Then we bought our glass through them, and it was at this point that it all went wrong. I placed the order to deliberately coincide with my holiday. I’m a teacher and my holidays aren’t movable, we have elderly family nearby, but no one strong enough to assist with delivery (something Origin were insistent we had on site for the delivery).
Though no fault of Origin, the third party glass manufacturer had a technical issue with their manufacturing process and despite two promised delivery dates, failed to fulfill the order. The end of my summer holiday arrived, we still had no glass for our balcony, so I was referred to a manager: enter Nick Watson, the managing director.
My predicament was unique, it was September, my next holiday was October but we’d already booked to be away, therefore the next time I’d be available to receive a delivery would be Christmas. Nick Watson point blank refused to lift a finger to help, instead offering me three options:
1) get the glass (all 300kg of it) delivered to a different address and move it all myself at my own risk to my home address. I couldn’t do that.
2) ask a neighbour to be there for delivery. Also not possible given that both my neighbours are female and the youngest one is 76 years old.
3) ask a family member to be there for delivery. Also not possible given that all our family members strong enough to lift the glass (each pane was 50kg) work full time and live over an hour away.
You’ll notice that each of the solutions Nick Watson proposed involved me and my family bending over backwards to solve the problem, and Origin architectural doing nothing. I pointed this out to Nick (who by the way had also decided to keep our money) and he refused to talk to me about it. In fact he wouldn’t even let me speak, choosing instead to interrupt me and tell me I was wasting my time. There was no ‘I will make some calls and get this sorted out for you’ there was no effort. All there was was a smug, rude little man on the end of a phone who knew he had hold of our money and could delay delivery for as long as he wanted.
For nearly two months he kept our money, made no phone calls to us to try to resolve the problem. In the end I gave up trying to speak to Nick Watson and went straight to the third party manufacturer who were amazing. They went out of their way to ensure that the delivery happened at a time convenient to us, with a driver who could do the unloading. My 70 year old father in law was present at the delivery, and had to do no heavy lifting. I’ve left that glass company a glowing review as they were willing to actually make effort to help, instead of sneering down the phone at us, which is the strategy of choice for Nick Watson at Origin. What makes it worse, is that Nick easily could have called the manufacturer like I did, and got the same outcome. But no, lifting a finger for him was absolutely out of the question.
Leah, Robyn and crew at Origin were knowledgeable and easy to deal with. If you manage to make an order with them then I’ve no doubt all will be well. If something goes wrong though, and you have to deal with Mr Watson, you should expect to deal with a rude, incompetently lazy individual, incapable of taking responsibility for anything, uncooperative, with a vocabulary that doesn’t include the word ‘sorry’.
I remember when Nick Watson told me that refusing to do anything to help us was his ‘business position’. Well this is my ‘personal position’ and this review is more than deserved.