Jean-Luc, thank you for updating this. You did not have to take back what you said about our honesty, and doing it in public says more about you than about us.
The service failures you list are real and I am not going to dress them up: three emails unanswered in August, a delivery scan that fired a day before the parcel actually reached your door, and an affidavit that would not even open. Every one of those is ours.
On the piece itself I owe you an explanation rather than an apology, because the two things you are comparing are not the same material. A Kallax is engineered board with a printed surface: it can be milled identically a million times, which is exactly why it looks uniform - and also why a shelf rated for 13 kg starts to bow under a row of records, which weighs 23 to 25. Ours is solid paulownia. Solid timber has grain, uneven density and it moves with humidity, and that is the reason it carries the weight of a collection without sagging. Machine uniformity is what you trade away to get that. Different grain, different tone, the odd knot: that is wood, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
But that is not what you described. Large gaps between panels and boxes that do not sit square are not the timber - that is our cutting tolerance, and it is ours to fix. You are not the only person who has run into it in that batch, we know where it comes from, and it is the specific thing being corrected in the current production.
What we do when a piece is not right is the same for everyone: we replace it or we refund it in full, and we do not argue about it. I have written to you privately with both options, because I would rather you took one than kept a piece you do not enjoy. - Guillermo, co-founder