Ad description
A website for Suite-World, www.suite-world.co.uk, seen in January 2017, under the tab “Leather Suites” stated “The height of luxury, a real leather sofa is truly the finest furniture you can buy for your home or living room. Suite world is proud to offer you a stylish and comfortable range of real leather sofas that are not only made from the finest materials ...”.
The product page for their “Elsa Package Deal” sofas, which was featured under the tab “Leather Suites”, stated “The Elsa Leather match … The suite is covered in stylish leather match”.
Issue
The complainant, who had purchased the sofa and subsequently discovered the material used was not leather, challenged whether the "leather" claims were misleading.
Response
Suite-World.co.uk Ltd t/a Suite World stated that the sofa was made of “leather match” though did not provide a definition of what this meant and that this was stated on the product description. They said that there were many different forms of leather, just as there were with fabric. They stated that they did not intend to mislead customers and when the sofa was a variation on leather this would be stated in the product description.
Suite World stated that including leather match and other variations on leather furniture, under the broad description of leather was common practice in their industry.
Assessment
Upheld
The ASA considered that consumers, in the absence of further information, would understand the claim “Leather Suites” to mean that the relevant parts of the sofas were made from 100% leather. We considered that consumers would further understand the claims, “The height of luxury, a real leather sofa” and “Suite World is proud to offer you a stylish and colourful range of real leather sofas” to mean that the relevant parts of every sofa in the “Leather Suites” range was made entirely from leather, rather than a substitute material.
We acknowledge that the product page for the “Elsa” sofas stated that the sofa was “leather match”. However, there was no description of what “leather match” consisted of on the product description, and we considered that this is not something that consumers were likely to be aware of. We understood that “leather match sofas” had some parts made of leather, and others of a different material, like vinyl. We understood that the amount of leather in “leather match” furniture could vary. We considered that this was material information that consumers should be made aware of before buying the sofa and should have been prominently displayed on the product page.
However, even if this had been the case, we would still consider that consumers would be likely to interpret any sofa contained in a range which has the description “real leather sofas” to be made entirely of leather. We think that the general impression given by the inclusion of the description of “leather match” as part of a range called “Leather Suites” which was described as “real leather” and “made from the finest materials” implied that leather match was a type of leather. Because “leather match” furniture was only partly made from leather we concluded that the ad was misleading.
The ad breached CAP Code (Edition 12) rules 3.1 and 3.3 (Misleading advertising) and 3.9 (Qualification).
Action
The ad must not appear again in its current form. We told Suite World to make changes to their website to make it clear what the leather content of their products was and not to misleadingly imply that products were 100% leather when that was not the case.
