Furniture Manufacturing Editing and Proofreading Services

A wardrobe arrives in three flat boxes. Somebody who has never assembled anything spreads the parts across a bedroom floor with a small metal key and a booklet, and over the next two hours they will either succeed or put a screw through a visible face. Nothing about the product will be remembered as clearly as those two hours, and the entire experience is controlled by a document with almost no words in it.

We edit what furniture manufacturers produce — assembly instructions and their sequences, parts and fittings identification schedules, packing lists and box contents documentation, care, cleaning and maintenance instructions, wall fixing and safety warnings including tip-over information, product specification and materials documentation, warranty documentation and its conditions, retailer and trade product information, installation instructions for fitted furniture, and customer service and spare parts documentation. Our editors work on the booklet somebody follows on a bedroom floor.

The assembly instruction is the whole customer experience of flat-pack furniture, and its failures are consistent across the industry. Parts are named in a way that does not match the parts, orientation is ambiguous at exactly the step where getting it wrong is irreversible, and the fixings all look the same in a diagram. We work through these so the first page is a parts check with quantities and a distinguishing feature for each — not "panel C" but the panel with two rows of holes rather than one — since the commonest failure is starting with the wrong panel and discovering it four steps later; so fixings are identified by length in millimetres and by what they look like, with a life-size row printed on the page so somebody can hold theirs against it; so every step where orientation matters says which face is visible and which edge is up, in words as well as in the diagram, because a mirrored panel installed backwards is usually unrecoverable; so the irreversible steps are marked before they happen with what to check first, given that a warning after the step is a complaint; so the steps requiring a second person are marked at the start rather than discovered mid-lift; so the wall fixing and tip-over warning is placed where somebody assembling it will act on it rather than in the safety pages; and so the instruction says what to do about a missing or damaged part before the customer improvises. Instructions written this way generate reviews about the furniture rather than about the instructions.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including designs, instructions and product information. We are editors rather than product or safety engineers, and we offer no view on design, assembly methods or product safety. What we can do is make the booklet work on the floor.