I wanted to leave a poor review for this business for a while (and mine will be the second since October, looks like it!) but I managed to get a hold of myself. Until now. We purchased 3 Hunter-Douglas PowerView honeycomb shades (meaning equipped with electric motors, two battery-operated models, one plugged-in model) from Fred Wee at Interiors & Textiles in 2017. Before doing so we had asked for another quote from a store in Sunnyvale, which ended up being cheaper. However, Wee sold us with his so-called fancy Palo Alto "Diamond Customer Service", meaning in-essence his store was in a higher-tier of Hunter-Douglas resellers with better customer support and perks. Or whatever.
All of our shades failed after a year or so and had to be sent back to Hunter-Douglas. All 3 of them. Motor issues. Antenna issues. App and Internet hub control issues. WiFi repeaters that never did anything. Poorly-designed remotes with tiny buttons that don't even hold their batteries in place, hence random losses of power of the units. How hard is that to do? Actually, I forgot to mention all 3 remotes had to be replaced also; after a while their buttons start blinking stupidly when you press on them and nothing happens. Manufacturing defect. But all of this is more the fault of Hunter-Douglas than Wee's.
Anyway, one of our shades (most expensive one, plugged-in) just failed for the 4th time! It doesn't respond to its the remote control, and the physical reset button (of the shade) is not doing anything as it appears to be stuck and doesn't move (poor craftsmanship). Did I mention mold all over the window-facing side? Yuck.
I e-mailed Wee directly and he is completely unresponsive on the matter. I therefore logged a support request with Hunter-Douglas who in turn contacted him to ask him to assist us, no reply either. Very professional! Yelp won't let me attach a screenshot of their response to me, however I'm posting the text of their e-mail at the end of this review.
I'll add that every time we had to ship back a shade WE had to bring it to Wee so he could pack and send it (at our expense!), taking one hour minimum from work for the round-trip to/from his store, which is 6 miles from our house, so an easy trip for him or one of his minions, who I'm sure have install jobs in our area every single day. And I'm not including OUR time to uninstall the shade, having no shade for weeks (had to buy temporary paper shades at Lowe's otherwise hello 6am sunshine), then our time again to go back to pick up the shade and install it again. That has always been ALL ON US. Not once did he offer to pick up/drop back the shades. Not once did he offer to come and troubleshoot our issues, to ensure that the shades were definitely not fixable on-site and that the only way to repair them was to send them back to Hunter-Douglas, which is, obviously, a major inconvenient and a last-resort thing. Not once did he show an ounce of empathy about our problem. So much for his fantastic Diamond Customer Support! And that's after giving him $4k of our hard-earned money for this horrible product from Hunter-Douglas, promising control via Alexa - a feature that never worked due to their ridiculously poor software (their in-house app never worked properly either).
Because of Wee ghosting me, this time I've worked directly with Hunter-Douglas after doing some troubleshooting and they will send me the part which I think has failed on our shade (they normally don't do it for this type of electronic board); hopefully I'll be able to replace it easily and won't have to send the shade back a 4th time (on my own).
I will never buy from this store again and advise friends and family members to stay away. Thank you for making us waste our time due to your non-existent "Diamond Customer Support", Fred Wee. You're a fraud and now Hunter-Douglas knows about it, I hope they investigate you and ban you from their approved resellers pool. To avoid this bad review, you just had to reply to the e-mail I sent you 9 days ago asking for your help but you chose not to, and you had another chance with the follow-up I sent 6 days later because I hadn't heard back.
Response from Hunter-Douglas, for what it's worth:
Hello Nicolas,
The shade will have to be shipped back to be assessed. Since Mr Wee is nonresponsive to both of us, I will have to refer you elsewhere.
I will get back to you with a referral.
Thank you,
Roxanne
Hunter Douglas Consumer Support Specialist read more