Bonito is a real fraudster and the most unethical designer to deal with. Please stay away from their so-called celebrity design scam. They have taken 1, 77, 324(one Lac seventy-seven thousand three hundred twenty-four) as booking fee and compelled me to cancel the booking. The project cost revised from 17 to 26L. It’s been 6 months now I am following up for the refund. They have literally done NOTHING except giving some basic useless designs.
To reduce the cost they compelled us to compromise with design, dimensions or quality which we didn’t agree for. In first interaction, you will get VIP treatment and they keep on mentioning “personal attention” and “customisation” which they actually fail to deliver in a big way once you pay the booking amount. We were searching interior designer for our house and we interacted with Bonito.
We visited Bonito and saw their experience centre in Thane which is actually good enough to influence anybody. I was told by their representatives(Anurag Sharma and Shrutika Borse) to pay 27K upfront as an intent to proceed ahead with Bonito designs. We were told that this amount will be refunded with “No questions asked” if we don’t like their design. Based on their words I paid Rs. 27000 same day. They assigned a designer to understand our taste who shared few images and prepared a basic PPT and named it “celebrity design”. They jotted down all our requirements and asked us to visit the experience centre again on 25th June. They noted all requirements and then gave us a final quote of 18.5 Lac which was not under our budget of 17 Lac.
We immediately said no as it was way beyond our expectations, they took some approvals and came back to us with waiver and froze the final amount to 17.5 Lac. We clearly mentioned that this is our final limit and beyond this, no scope of revision from our end. We were assured by the Bonito team Anurag Sharma, Shrutika Borse, Naini Panjwani and a few of their strategic team members that this is the final quote and in our case, it will decrease and will not increase in any case however it if is increasing it will not be more then 3-5% because they have already considered the things on a higher side. Basis their commitment we agreed and paid them another Rs. 1, 58, 324 as the booking amount. And from now the Bonito team start revealing their capabilities.
They assigned a designer(Ruchika Khatri) who was not able to connect and somehow struggled to understand our needs. We still invested good two weeks to make her understand and the result was not satisfactory. We were fed up to the extent that we asked to change the designer but the request was overlooked by Bonito. The senior designer Ms. NainiPanjwani pitched in with her useless ideas or to handle the situation but not with practical solutions. In nutshell, it was a mental trauma for us to deal with them and ultimately we agreed for a basic kind of design as we were frustrated and actually tired of these multiple meetings with them. We were told that based on changes the final quotation will be ready in a week but even after multiple reminders, the final quotation was not coming.
We blasted on them and rushed to their experience centre after 7-10 days where we were told that the final quote is underway but the interim workings are done. To our surprise, the quote was revised from 17.5 Lac to 25.6 Lac which was 48% rise. This was more than shocking and way beyond our budget. They created a situation which compelled us to stop moving ahead with them. They proposed design cuts, compromising quality and reducing dimensions to bring down the cost which was not acceptable to us.
After multiple reiterations, we gave up and asked them to stop working on this project. We asked to refund the amount to us after deducting their design fee but its been 6 months now there is no refund from them.
Anybody intending to go with Bonito, please beware of their trap. I somehow feel that they deliberately work like this to raise funds by cheating on people. Absolutely pathetic and shameless people they are -stay away. Supporting attached.