Nadia spent $1700 on this new bed – but what she got is ‘ridiculous’

A Queensland family is outraged to discover they will only receive two-thirds of a bed they fully paid for, after the company sensationally imploded.

A Queensland family is outraged to discover they will only receive two thirds of a bed they paid for, and they will have to fork out an additional $263 on top of the original $1600 payment.

Nadia, who preferred not to use her last name, is one of the customers involved in the collapse of Australian furniture seller Brosa.

On January 31, the retailer went into liquidation, and reportedly owes $24 million, including $10 million to customers from unfulfilled orders.

E-commerce retail giant Kogan.com bought Brosa’s assets for $1.5 million, with Kogan agreeing to return furniture if they discovered products rightfully belonging to customers in the Brosa warehouse.

Last month news.com.au reported that Kogan.com was passing on delivery fees to customers supposed to be receiving the furniture they had already fully paid for, in some cases as high as $1719 for one Perth man.

Mum-of-two Nadia and her husband spent around $1600 buying a brand new king size gaslift bed in November.

Now they will have to fork out an additional $263 in delivery fees if they wish to ever see their bed.

But in an even more bizarre twist, only two parts of the bed have been located in the warehouse, with the third disappearing, which means they will only receive two thirds of the entire bed.

“It’s ridiculous,” Nadia, 40, told news.com.au.

The bed they paid for.

Nadia received an email in January from KordaMentha, the insolvency firm put in charge of Brosa’s winding up, which showed the original piece of furniture she’d paid for had been broken up into three separate sections.

In the email, they informed her that the bed base sides and the bed base slats had been classified as “allocated stock” – which means that they had been discovered inside the Brosa warehouse.

Meanwhile, the bed head has been deemed “unallocated stock” – which means it could not be located.

This will leave her with an item of furniture that is essentially useless – and not at all what she paid for, according to the mum.

“I can’t even imagine if we’ve been offered half a bed, what have other people been offered?” Nadia said.

“It’s an absolute nightmare, really mismanaged.”

With the additional delivery fee, she said the overall cost will be around $1800 – “which we can’t afford with two young children”.

“Especially with the cost of living, we can’t buy a new bed head. We still have our old bed which is 13 years old, we can’t do anything with that.

“It’s just stressful, $1700 that can be used on things for our kids.”

Nadia is furious by the situation, as she is having to pay more money for only a partial.

She said the $1500 would have been better spent on her kids amid the cost of living crisis.

Nadia can abandon her stock if she decides she doesn’t want to pay the $263 delivery fee. But this will leave her as an unsecured creditor with no prospects of getting the bed she paid for – and she is unexpected to not receive a cent for her lost money through the liquidation process, as few assets are left.

She is angry because she believes she should be supplied with a store credit if the liquidators and Kogan.com can’t supply her with the furniture they originally promised her.

“They’ve given our hopes up that we might get something,” Nadia said.

“They (the liquidators) had promised the stock or a credit in previous email but now (they’re) only saying we can accept our allocated stock and pay another $263 for delivery.”

A federal court ruled that Kogan.com was allowed to charge delivery fees. The same orders ruled that the “allocated” customers were the legal owners of the goods and they could not be sold to anyone else – unless they opted to abandon their stock.

In this email, you can see that only two out of three of the beds components were offered to Nadia.

Nadia has also been left frustrated because she feels caught in the middle of a blame game between the liquidators, KordaMentha, and the new owner of Brosa’s stock, Kogan.com.

“It’s kind of like playing tennis, the balls going back and forth (between them),” she said.

While Kogan.com declined to comment for this particular story, in a previous article, they said they “never received any proceeds for any orders” and insisted the firm “has passed on the wholesale cost of each delivery with zero mark-up”.

News.com.au understands that Kogan.com spends $100 million on shipping a year and that it’s more expensive to deliver to some parts of Australia than others, particularly bulkier items.

In a statement, a spokesperson for KordaMentha said “Pursuant to the Court Orders and the sale agreement, Kogan is entitled to either charge a reasonable delivery fee to facilitate delivery or offer a store credit (i.e. at their election).

“We understand Kogan now intends to only offer delivery to Allocated Stock customers (i.e. not offer a store credit) and to charge a reasonable delivery fee in all instances.”

The liquidators also explained why Nadia was only getting two thirds of a bed, saying the three different parts had a unique stock ID.

“It was always possible that customers would have some components of an item classified as allocated and some unallocated,” they added.

Nadia paid $1599 for the bed.

Another customer, Lucy Smith, spoke to news.com.au last month, frustrated because the status of her furniture changed from “allocated” to “unallocated” which means she is not entitled to get any of her furniture back.

Ms Smith, from the Sydney suburb of Ryde, spent $2278 on a couch in November but is expecting to never recover her money.

“I’m left in absolute limbo,” she said. “I’m getting more and more stroppy, where is my lounge?

“I still have an air mattress as a lounge, I’ve had to go to a physio as a result of it.”

Jay Williams, from Sydney, who spoke to news.com.au last month, spent $4000 for two sofas right before Brosa’s collapse.

“I’ve just paid a small fortune to move house, then paid a small fortune for furniture, I can’t afford new furniture,” Mr Williams said.

One of Mr Williams’ sofas was “allocated” in the warehouse which means he will receive it in due course.

The other purchase, however, was deemed “unallocated”, which means he will not be receiving it or getting his money back.

Another customer, Jenny, who preferred not to use her last name, is over $2000 in the red because her couch was also not located in the warehouse.

“We are never going to see our furniture and now are not entitled to refunds from the administrators,” the Perth resident lamented.

“I’m a TAFE student, my partner works in hospitality, it’s a huge chunk of money for us. We have sacrificed doing other things, so we could shell out on this couch that we really loved, that would last us years and years.”

The Melbourne-based start-up was launched by CEO Ivan Lim along with co-founders David Wei and Richard Li in 2014.

Brosa enjoyed unprecedented sales as e-commerce boomed at the height of the Covid-19 crisis, but had been struggling in 2022 as customers returned to physical stores.

*Last name withheld for privacy reasons

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