Has anyone had any recent experience dealing with Mianne benchwork?
I placed an order about 6 weeks ago. After a month I sent an email just asking politely if they had an estimated ship date. No response. So I called. It seems they remembered talking to me, but had lost my order. I asked what usual shipping time was, and all they said was I should have received it by then. So I gave them the list of items again. They indicated they should be able to get the order out by the next day. I called back again after two weeks to see if they had an estimated ship date. This time they seemed apologetic, remembered talking to me, but couldn’t find my order. So I gave it to them a third time. This time they said they could get it shipped that week. Well now its the following week and no word from them yet. I’m afraid to call again because I don’t want to be pushy and frankly I’d probably end up getting mad and canceling the order.
I originally placed the order with Mianne for three reasons:
First, I really like their product. It is very nice quality and unlike anything else out there. Since it has to go in my house and not in the garage, it is important to me (and the wife) that it looks nice. This stuff does.
Second, everything I read in previous posts indicated that Tim at Mianne was a pleasure to do business with. That was important to me.
Third, the whole concept of the Mianne benchwork is that it is expandable. However, that “feature” also requires a degree of trust. If I order something from them and then want to expand in six months, I would like to know that I can go back to them and order additional benchwork. The expandability is lost if they are flaky and unreliable to do business with and I can’t get the additional items.
So my question: Is there something going on over there? It seems very strange that they keep "losin
I agree with Rich. How big an operation are they? If it’s one person making the product, there may be health or family issues that are delaying the production and shipment of your order. In any case, they owe you some explanation for the loss of your order and the lack of product. If they can’t give you an explanation that seems reasonable, I’d cancel the order and go to another vendor. I’d be really concerned about their reliability, especially if you plan to use their product in the future for the expansion of your layout.
Benchwork is not that difficult to build. I’d suggest you get a copy of Jeff Wilson’s book, “Basic Model Railroad Benchwork - The Complete Photo Guide” or the latest edition of Linn Westcott’s book, “How to Build Model Railroad Benchwork”. Depending on the size of your layout, I think you’ll find it doesn’t take that long to build good quality benchwork without the aggravation of dealing with a non-responsive vendor. In addition, you’ll have the satisfaction of having done it yourself and probably save money in the process.
I would call today or tomorrow and if it hasn’t shipped, cancel the order. If it has shipped, ask who and get a tracking number. That way you can monitor it yourself.
Check your credit card for sure. Regardless of what is going on with-in a business this sounds bad. My advise is, get out, get out, get out! I have had two problems such as this in my 60 yr plus life and never messed with unreliable businesses again. It’s called piece of mind. DR
Cancel and call Sievers, e-mails can be lost or misdirected, everyone assumes e-mails are infallable but they are not. Sievers has been arround a long time and if I was in your situation, I would be buying theirs!!!
At this point, you’re not being “pushy.” If you still want to give them the benefit of the doubt, ask if they can ship in the next two days. If they say no, then cancel. If they say yes, wait two days and ask for a tracking number. If it hasn’t shipped, cancel the order. You have been very patient with them already, and they have only themselves to blame.
Check your credit card bill (online if possible) and see if they have charged your card. If they charged it immediately when you placed the order, that’s a red flag right there. Contact your credit card company and ask how long you have after a charge is made to dispute the charge. You may be running close to a 60-day limit, and you want to make sure you can get this off your card without having to hassle with the supplier.
Well I went ahead and called them again this morning. This time they definitely remembered me. They promised once again that they would get the order out this week and they didn’t ask me to repeat the items I ordered. It sounds like an employee quit there and he is short handed - not sure exactly.
Meanwhile Sievers returned my phone call (how refreshing to get return calls from a vendor!). They said they typically ship in 3 days give or take 1 or 2 days.
So my plan is to give Mianne until the end of the week and then order from Sievers on Monday if I don’t get a shipping notice. I hope I don’t regret this. I only ordered about half of what I will eventually need, so if I can’t go back for repeat business I will have made a huge mistake. My problem at the moment is I already cut all the Baltic Birch plywood to the dimensions of the Mianne benchwork. So I’m already invested a couple hundred dollars into the Mianne solution. However that is a minor issue compared to getting my layout half built and then finding I’m unable to get the follow-on order fullfilled.
I learned a long time ago to trust my first instincts. Usually when something doesn’t seem right from 3000 miles away its probably because it isn’t. Unfortunately I seem to have forgotten this lesson this time. I’m really relying on the positive comments that Mianne has received from several members of this board in the past. It seems that at least at one time this was a good company that people liked doing business with. I hope whatever is going on right now is just a temporary thing. I really wouldn’t mind it if he had just told me up front that he had a 8-12 week backlog. I would have just patiently waited. Telling me over and over that he will get the order out in a matter of days though is not how a responsible business treats their customers.
This sounds like an iffy place to do business. Assuming you eventually get what you ask, and if they know you need more, now they have you completely by the short ones.
It is nothing short of discourteous to neglect to inform a prospective customer, or one with whom you had agreed to provide materials or a service, that you are falling behind. I think it is unethical, too. If you value people, just for being people, and not because they happen to be customers, you would offer them the courtesy of learning of your predicament, and you would free them to find other ways to get what they need when they need it. Look at it this way: suppose our friend here had arranged, at long last, and after much negotiation, to get three friends to come over and help him to erect the materials on a Sunday afternoon. It took some doing, but finally a Sunday afternoon could be penciled in on a calendar where they were all free. Our friend contracts for the materials to be delivered well ahead of time, say two full weeks. If we go by the timeline he has given us, that Sunday would long since have passed, and he STILL hasn’t managed to pry a shipment notice out of the supplier.
That kind of service belongs well sunk in a one-holer out back.
Customer service these days is pretty terrible, but this story beats most. Treating a customer with cash in hand this way makes me cringe thinking about how they’ll treat you if/when you have a problem. You think you’re not getting callbacks now? Try calling with a problem, lol.
Take your money & run.
Let’s say they do come through for you. Great. But their customer servicve remains terrible and they’re OUT OF BUSINESS by the time you want to buy the items to finish your layout. Judging by this story, it seems likely to happen. Now what? The “what” is you’ll have to either build the remaining pieces yourself, which you’ve already said you don’t want to do… or find another place to $$$ custom build $$$ it and hope it matches up, or toss it and start fresh. No options are good options there.
Wow, I guess I’m a tiny bit surprised by how overwhelmingly negative the consensus view is here. I guess I was somehow expecting (hoping?) someone to speak up for them based on their past positive experience, or perhaps to remind me that most of these hobby businesses are very small one man operations that struggle financially and that I should be more understanding and not have the same expectations as if I am dealing with a more established business outside the hobby industry.
My problem is that I believe in their product. It is very nice. However, if they let me down again this week by not meeting their promises I will willingly admit to being a fool on this issue.
I appreciate all the feedback. It helps me to know I’m not being unreasonable, and if I have to switch to Sievers on Monday I will know that I (finally) did the right thing.
I will remind you what you first wrote. Here it is, verbatim.
I placed an order about 6 weeks ago. After a month I sent an email just asking politely if they had an estimated ship date. No response. So I called. It seems they remembered talking to me, but had lost my order. I asked what usual shipping time was, and all they said was I should have received it by then. So I gave them the list of items again. They indicated they should be able to get the order out by the next day. I called back again after two weeks to see if they had an estimated ship date. This time they seemed apologetic, remembered talking to me, but couldn’t find my order. So I gave it to them a third time. This time they said they could get it shipped that week. Well now its the following week and no word from them yet.
There is a difference between being a small business and being incompetent. They lose your
Wow! Color me really, really cheap, but I just went to the Mianne and Sievers web sites and priced the products. Please don’t think I’m bad mouthing these solutions, but I find them very expensive for what they are. I know they have a place in the hobby, but I really didn’t expect them to be so pricey. I actually had been considering Seivers as an option, and I didn’t know about Mianne, so your OP got me to looking. I will be going with my original domino design using 1/4" and 1/2" plywood witth 3/4" homasote. I can assemble all of the sections of my 8’ x 10’ x 5’ shelf layout for the less than the cost of two 2’ x 4’ Mianne sections. I have the tools and time to cut and assemble the plywood into the layout sections I need, so I guess I’m in a different situation. Thanks for the push to look though.
Well, you’re right about that… guys like you and me, with decent woodworking skills, can whack this stuff out – similar quality, even – for a fraction of the cost.
The other issue is that benchwork doesn’t have to be showroom quality. It just has to be functional. A lot of people think they can’t build benchwork, but if they can use a saw, a carpenter’s square, and a measuring tape, they probably can. Power tools make it easier, but are not essential (and they can be rented pretty cheaply).
For the OP… you say you believe in their product, but have you ever seen it? The other thing is, you expected people to defend them (I can’t… never used them) but the title of your post doesn’t exactly pull Mianne users in. Maybe if you started another one, using their name in the title, you’d get better results.
I have the Sievers benchwork because I have neither the tools nor the time nor inclination to make the benchwork myself. The service was excellent, the product is excellent, and I recommend it although it is admittedly more costly than building from scratch. You might be able to adapt your plywood to the Siever module sizes which are of common dimensions.
Dante
PS. They might even be willing to do custom sizes-for a price, I would imagine.
PPS. It looks good, too, in reference to one of your comments about Mianne. I painted mine because it is in a finished room, and I wanted to minimize moisture absorption although it is in a controlled environment.