Kenney M.

I'll use Blick again but not because I'm happy.

If I could Blick to do some things differently, it would be to package things better, stop using Fedex since they are the ones who seem to literally throw stuff on their box corners out of the trucks, check the quality of the goods before they are packaged.

Credentials: I'm a professional artist who paints full time for a living and sells around 70K worth of art a year. (I'm a former tenured professor of art and art history.) I by all my supplies through Blick but, I still am annoyed by them.

I feel about Blick the way the I feel about Amazon, they don't care about how you feel: provide poor customer service but they have the monopoly.

I order almost all my supplies from Blick, canvas panels, stretched canvas, Winsor Newton paints, brushes, the whole shebang. I have ordered the same products and amounts from other sites and the prices are comparable but often the quality, delivery time, and customer service are worse. So Blick is able to beat grade "C" companies with a "B-" although at times I've had an "A" level experience too.

I always expect things to arrive damaged or poorly packed. How things are shipped sucks, and often things are damaged. Paint tubes are poorly packed and busted open or cut by the other items in the boxes and corners of canvas panels are sometimes damaged, and stretched canvas is often loose due to poor warehouse conditions or poor packing, but Blick always replaces them if you get in touch.

For example, I just got a shipment of 18x18x1.5 inch stretched canvases and the boxes were really messed up (the canvases were okay to use just loose or dented) easily fixed, I have had to spray canvas retentioner on every canvas to tighten them back up. I've actually got in touch with the owners by figuring out their emails and they have offered me coupons and discounts.

Sorry! I really wanted to like/use this company instead of $#*!blick or another large company. I spent about $2000 on stretched canvases and canvas panels. I'm really disappointed and I'm a full time artist looking for reliable suppliers.

Shipment was late two weeks. When I communicated with customer service they blamed it on shipper but then realized they still had to build several of the stretcher bars and canvases.

I had to use canvas retensioner/tightened because the way in which they were shipped pressed the edges and created indents in the canvas near the stretcher bars.

Canvas panels had wrinkled and buckled paper on the backs of almost all of them. Poor craft and gluing.

I communicated by phone and email about my complaints and I was promised that I would get some sort of compensation but none arrived. They were very pleasant but I got the feeling it was politeness not sincere concern.

I have had similar but not as bad problems with Blick or Utrecht but when something is damaged or unusable, those companies send replacements free of charge, and sometimes have sent me a small coupon or gift certificate to compensate me.