Pottery Barn: Ultimate Brand Review And Rating

Visiting Pottery Barn’s website will instantly remind you why they’re so respected and esteemed in the furniture world. They have an absolutely gorgeous website that draws you in and makes you desperately want to buy every piece of decor in every single one of their glamorous photos. Even better, the site is also quite functional and easy to navigate in addition to having lovely visual flourishes throughout.

Ease of Navigation

• As I said, Pottery Barn’s homepage is stunning. You should spend some time just scrolling through it to enjoy and appreciate what they’ve put together. It’s truly lovely.
• Pottery Barn’s menu system is very functional considering the number of products they sell. I appreciate that they give “Furniture” its own category, which then gets broken down by specific rooms. It’s all very neat and tidy and it was easy to find what I was looking for.
• The “Sofas” and “Sectionals” category pages have a very elegant and practical layout. They also feature nice large images to help break up the monotony of product listings. These are very smartly and thoughtfully placed. My main gripe is that they show the same couch multiple times in slightly different variations to make it seem like their catalog is larger than it actually is.
• The “Sofas & Sectionals” category page displays each sofa collection, as opposed to individual couches. This alternate display is also very chic and a great way to browse their offerings.
• Pottery Barn provides dozens of different filters you can use to find the perfect sofa for your home and budget. They also have a “Quick Ship” filter, but this one doesn’t work very well since nearly every sofa has at least one quick ship option available.
• The product pages are also quite nice. I like the way they organize their product information, dimensions, and details. The main issue is that, despite there not being that many choices to make, the customization and fabric selection panes take up so much vertical space that you end up scrolling up and down quite a bit. This is especially true since choosing a fabric or customization may change the price. Then you’ll have to scroll up or down to find the price to see if your choice affected it.
• It can also be unclear that there are dozens of fabric choices since there’s another scrolling section within the fabrics window itself. On mobile this can be even easier to miss since the way to scroll through fabrics on your phone is side-to-side.

Information Available “At-A-Glance”

• On category pages they list the couch name, show a selection of fabrics it’s available in, let you know if there are “more” fabric options, list the price range, and let you know if a couch is a “bestseller” or a “new arrival.” It’s a good amount of info.
• They also provide little icons to let you know if a couch has specific sustainable or eco-friendly features. For instance, an FSC-Certified wood icon or a BIFMA compliant tag.

Product Images

• The couch images on category pages are very professional. The couches are photographed against a light gray backdrop on top of a well-worn wooden floor. It nails the modern/rustic vibe that Pottery Barn has perfected over the years.
• Hovering over the sofa listings either shows a lovely lifestyle image of the couch in a home, or an alternate angle of the couch, or a special feature like a pull-out mattress. In some cases there were no alternate photos, which was surprising given the scale of the company. But that’s only a minor quibble.
• On product pages, the main couch image is nice and large. Then there’s a carousel of images that feature a good mix of alternate angles, close-ups of features, and lifestyle images in homes. It gives you a very good idea of how the couch will look in different settings and different lighting.
• My main issue with the product photos is that the main couch image is the only one that changes when you make any customization choices, including fabric. This would be OK, but all the different fabrics simply don’t look great on the couch image. It’s hard to get a sense of texture or true color depth. It would be very helpful to see more real-life images in different fabrics to really understand the differences in each fabric and how those will impact the overall style of your sofa.

Quality of Product Information

• I was pleased to see that Pottery Barn does a very good job listing its product information. They list the cushion construction, the spring support system, the frame’s composition and construction, and they even list the joinery methods. I was also happy to see that they provided manufacturing origins for each sofa.
• The only additions I’d like to see for their product details would be a specific country of origin if the couch is an “Import,” a specific density for the foam in the cushions, and the exact cleaning codes of the fabrics. Fabric cleaning codes can be very useful to let customers know if they can use water or solvent-based cleaners on their fabrics.
• The dimensions they list are great and very practical. They have everything you’d need to know, including important additions like “diagonal depth,” which can help you determine if a sofa will fit through doorways or hallways.

Extra Bells & Whistles

• Pottery Barn keeps track of any fabrics you’ve clicked on and then provides a list of them beneath the main product photo. That way you can easily compare a couple fabric options without having to scroll through the full fabric list every single time.
• Some couches have a 360 view option, but it’s not available for as many listings as you’d expect and it doesn’t work quite as smoothly as some competitors.