About Us
Everything we sell is bought from a photograph. That is worth sitting with for a moment, because a photograph is excellent at exactly one thing and unreliable about nearly everything that decides whether you keep a blanket or a shawl.
It tells you the pattern, the shape and roughly the size. That is real information and we are not dismissing it. But nobody has ever returned a throw because the pattern was a surprise. People return them because of weight, because of the way it hangs, because the colour did something different in their own front room, or because it stopped behaving like the thing they ordered somewhere around the third wash.
Not one of those four survives the journey through a camera.
Four things no photograph can carry
- Weight — the first thing you notice and the last thing an image conveys.
- Drape — how it falls when nobody is arranging it.
- Colour in your light — not in a studio's.
- What it does after the third wash — a photograph is always of a new object.
The rest of this page is those four, and then what we think a shop is obliged to do about them.
Weight
Pick up two throws that photograph identically and you can find a surprising difference in the hand. One settles on you; the other you keep adjusting. Both are perfectly good.
That is the part worth saying plainly: weight is a preference, not a quality grade. Heavier is not better made. A light one is not a corner cut. Someone reading in a chair for an hour wants something different from someone sleeping under it in February, and nothing in a product photograph distinguishes between those two people.
So if a figure matters to you, ask us. If we know it, you get it. If we don't, you get that answer instead — which is more useful than a confident guess.
Drape
This is the one that catches people out with shawls in particular, and it is the hardest thing to photograph honestly.
Every photograph shows one arrangement, and somebody arranged it. They pinched it, draped it over a shoulder at an angle that worked, and shot the side that hung best. You will never once wear it in that arrangement. You will throw it on while leaving the house, and whatever it does then is what it does.
The same applies to a blanket on a sofa. In the picture it is folded into a shape that holds. At home it is pushed to one end with a cushion on it. Neither image is dishonest; both are staged, and staging is specifically the part that drape is hidden by.
Colour in your light
A screen is lit from behind. A room is lit from in front, or from above, or on a November afternoon in Doncaster, barely at all.
That is not a small gap. A grey can read warm under a filament bulb and faintly blue by a north-facing window. A cream can look like a cream in a studio and like a pale yellow next to a white wall. We have no way of knowing what light your room gets, and anyone who tells you their photography solves this is selling you the photography.
Which is why the only honest way to settle it is to have the thing in the room — and that costs nothing only if returning it costs nothing.
What it does after the third wash
Every product photograph in the world is of an object that has never been used. There is no alternative; you cannot shoot the future.
But the first wash is rarely where soft textiles reveal themselves. It is the second and the third, when the surface either settles or starts to go. So the photograph is taken at the one moment that tells you least about the thing's life. It is a portrait of day nought.
We do not pretend to have solved that either. What we will say is that if something goes wrong at that point, it is not wear and tear and we do not treat it as such.
Why thirty days, and why it is not generosity
Here is the conclusion all of the above points at, and the reason it sits on an about page rather than buried in a policy.
The gap between a photograph and an object is structural, so the remedy has to be structural too. We cannot fix it with better lighting or longer descriptions. The only thing that closes it is you having the item in your own home, in your own light, in your hands — and being able to send it back without an argument if it is not right.
So: thirty days to change your mind. The law in the UK requires fourteen. We make it thirty on the same terms, because fourteen is enough time to form an opinion and not always enough to be sure of one.
And the conditions attached to it are the point:
No reason required. "It's not what I expected from the picture" is the whole of it, and it is a complete answer. That is precisely the problem this page is about.
No approval needed. Your email is the act. We are not deciding whether to allow it; we are telling you where to post it, because the address at the bottom of this page cannot take parcels.
No fixed deduction. Not for a missing bag, not for an unfolded blanket. Unfolding something to look at it is how it is sold, and if we charged you for that we would be charging you for using the thirty days.
What we try to do on our side of the gap
It would be a poor shop that explained the limits of photography and then relied entirely on it.
Say the things a photograph can't. Dimensions, material, care instructions, and whatever else is actually known about an item belong in the words, not in the styling of the shot. Where a figure is missing from a page, ask and we will go and find out.
Not use atmosphere as a substitute for information. A photograph of a lit fireplace with a throw nearby tells you about the fireplace.
Answer the question you asked. If you write and ask which of two is heavier, you get an answer about weight — not a paragraph about how both are wonderful choices.
Three things we don't do
Raise the price in order to cut it. The price is the price, in October and in December. It does not go up so that a percentage can be taken off it later.
Overclaim. A blanket will not change your evenings. What a good one does is stop being something you think about — it is where you left it, it still feels the way it did, and nothing about it needs dealing with. That is the entire ambition and it is deliberately unexciting.
Make the return the hard part. A shop that sells from photographs and then makes returning difficult has worked out that the gap is profitable. We would rather talk you out of the wrong item than process it twice.
Before you order, not after
If you are between two things, or unsure how something will sit, write to us — and tell us three things: where it is going to be used, who is going to use it, and what the light in that room is like.
Those three change the answer far more than any question about which item is best. A shawl for a cold office is a different recommendation from a shawl for a garden in April, and a blanket for one person reading is not the same as one for two people and a dog.
You will get a reply from a person within 2 working days, and an honest "we don't know that" when that is the truthful answer.
What you can count on
Thirty days to decide, with no reason, no approval step and no deduction for having looked at it.
One business day for a reply, from someone who will say so if they are unsure.
Your statutory rights in full, separately and on top — the thirty days sits alongside them and never replaces them.
Cosycombe LTD
- Address: St Sepulchre Gate, Doncaster DN1 1SW, United Kingdom
- Email: support@cosycombe.com
- Phone: +44 1302 368335
- Customer service: Monday–Friday, 9:00 am–5:00 pm
- Saturday and Sunday: Closed
- Response time: Within 2 working days