I wish I had a -ve rating option rather than 1 star. Design Cafe( DC) is a big scam. Anyone who want to hire them should please first try to reach out to me and I would be very glad to give you all proof of emails and WhatsApp chats to confirm what I have said here and in the future blogs is 100% accurate and is not something made up by one of their competitors just to malign them.
I had Design Cafe to do up my home in Jan 2017. I am a founder of a tech company and not any of their competitors trying to malign them. This is a 100% honest review so please read in detail if you are looking to hire them and are planning to spend your hard earned money. Their founders are Gita Ramanan and Shezan Bhojani. I hired them to complete my home as I thought they were a professional design company and also the fact that Gita was my senior from school. Their sales team head AKHILESH ( who is now apparently their SALES HEAD)is quite a smooth talker an sold us on the company’s talent and professionalism. They got me in touch with some of their customers to see their work which I eventually found out were all their BNI friends etc.( They have these few guys whose reviews are on their website and whose homes they show if you ask them for a reference check and one of their ex employees told me that they actually pay past customers to show their homes to new customers)
I had hired them with the hope that they will do wonderful job to design my house. However things went bad I guess from the first month of us signing up with them. We are almost 2 years into the project and we have paid over INR 40 lakhs in full to this company and the project is still not complete.
The company has delayed our project execution by over 12 months. Their CEO and founder do not respond to emails, phone calls or WhatsApp messages. 8 months into the project when their design team was failing, I had asked them to refund my money because their team was not delivering. We had already paid around 10 lakhs by then and their CEO Shezan said in a very easy tone that they DONT REFUND money. It was un believable, we were in stage 1 of the project, the only thing we had was the design that was pretty poor and the company refused to refund our money. On call their CEO went on to tell me that they do homes of all the rich and famous in the city and no one had raised issues that we had and that he will not refund us the money etc. Since we had already invested 10 lakhs and we could not afford to lose this we decided to continue. Things got a little better after that and we got into the execution phase and that is when things really really got messed up. I can tell you 1 thing, this company does not HONOUR timelines, their field team does not know how to execute projects, their employees are SUPER SLOW( we have videos recorded of their carpenter team chilling and taking breaks that sometime ran into 3-4 hours each day). Their carpenter team messed up so many things on site that it is un-believable( we have proof’s of chats etc for all this).
After their execution team started messing up I decided to escalate this matter and wrote a number of emails to their CEO etc and surprisingly I got ZERO response’s. I tried calling their CEO and he never took my calls, I called from another number and he gladly took that! As a matter of fact its gone to the extent that their OPERATIONS HEAD - Ganesh told me one day that he does not where their CEO is when I requested to talk to the CEO and I sent one of my office buys to discover their CEO was cooling his heals in his MG ROAD office. Their operation team does not really care for project execution and no one is responsible for delivery. We were promised a site manager to manage the site, we have not had any one for the entire project execution / Their OPERATIONS HEAD - Ganesh gave us a new deadline of APRIL 2019 to wrap up all work and in the month of September 2019 the project was still running. The designer their company had assigned us SALONI does not pick up phone calls and does not have the courteousy to respond to messages most times. Their contract etc states they will pay if they don’t deliver in time but every time we mentioned this they just put it back on us that we delayed them. They have taken all the money for the project in March 2019 and in September 2019 the site was lying in complete 6 months after paying 100% payment.
I will be writing a bunch of blogs describing my experience working with this company in detail so that they do what they did to us to any other hard working individual. I believe they have opened new offices now in Mumbai and have raised more capital, and I guess will want to take on more projects and ruin more projects like they did ours. I want to ensure that I get a 100% HONEST EXPERIENCE out in the media so that maybe we can save other people’s hard earned money, whilst we already lost ours. I want to make sure we are heard and other hard working people who spend LAKHS of their money on their homes thing twice before hiring DESIGN CAFE.
Anyone who want to hire them should please first try to reach out to us and I would be very glad to give you all proof of emails and WhatsApp chats to confirm what I have said here and in the future blogs is 100% accurate and is not something made up just to malign them.
The team I worked with from their office are Ganesh who is their Chief Operations Officer, Saloni their lead designer , Faisal who is their operations lead, Shezan is their CEO, Gita Raman is their founder.