smallkins.com

This was my first and will be my last…

This was my first and will be my last experience with Small Kins. I placed my order on 1 December and paid for 48-hour delivery. It is now 19 December, and a large part of my child’s Christmas gifts have still not been delivered.Small Kins relied on Royal Mail/Parcelforce tracking updates that proved to be inaccurate. I was told delivery had been attempted and that a calling card had been left — no card was ever left, and I was home with my infant on the stated delivery dates outwith school drop-off. My elderly, housebound neighbours were listed as the alternative delivery address and were never approached.After contacting Royal Mail/Parcelforce directly, I was explicitly told a redelivery had been booked and guaranteed for a specific date. No mention was made at that time of needing depot confirmation or any uncertainty. When the delivery failed to happen, I had to chase again and was only then told they were “waiting for the depot to confirm”. This pattern repeated, with assurances given first and caveats introduced only after those assurances were broken. Despite raising these issues immediately and repeatedly, Small Kins did not take ownership of resolving the situation and continued to direct me back to the courier, even where tracking links were broken and redelivery could not be booked. As the retailer, responsibility for delivery remained with Small Kins until completion. Instead, I have been left days before Christmas with no parcel, no certainty, and no practical support and certainly no resolution to be offered. I will now have to replace my daughter’s gifts at short notice because I cannot wait indefinitely.For contrast, I placed a last-minute order with Conscious Craft UK, who provided excellent communication, accountability, and genuinely superb customer service, exactly what was missing here.This experience was/is stressful, upsetting, and entirely avoidable, I am still awaiting any kind of support. I would not recommend Small Kins if you need reliability or meaningful customer support when something goes wrong.*****Update: Four days before Christmas, and in response to a clear request for a refund, I received an email via Rory that did not address that request at all. Instead, I was asked to select 6 alternative items (I ordered 10 items in total) for my order, despite more than half of the items being out of stock and there being no realistic possibility of anything arriving in time. This was a performative and empty gesture made with full knowledge that the outcome was already irreparable. Ignoring a refund request in favour of an offer that could not possibly resolve the situation was inappropriate, insulting, and demonstrated a complete disregard for timing, context, and accountability. This response was sent by Rory, an advisor who had already impeded resolution by repeatedly directing me to steps I had clearly explained were not working, and by failing to act when this could still have been rectified. Given his prior involvement, this response was not just performative, he directly contributed to the situation reaching this point and demonstrated a complete lack of accountability for the consequences of earlier inaction.

Date of experience: Dec 19, 2025