How Urban Ladder's audit and quality checks were set up around the way its own teams already run them

Urban Ladder started in 2012 with a catalogue of 35 designs. Today it sells sofas, beds, dining sets, storage, mattresses and decor online and through more than 50 stores, and it also offers modular kitchens, wardrobes and furniture repair services.

Selling furniture at that scale means a lot of checking happens away from a desk. Deliveries and installations at customer homes need to be done to a standard. Distribution centres need to be kept in order. Safety rules need to be followed. And every lot that comes in from a supplier needs to be inspected before it is accepted.

Each of these checks already had its own way of working inside Urban Ladder: who raises the audit, who reviews it, who signs it off, which questions are asked, and how many pieces from a lot need to be inspected. The task was to put those existing ways of working into one system, not to replace them with a standard template.

The system follows Urban Ladder's own roles. A manager raises an audit and works through the checklist. An auditor reviews each checkpoint and either accepts it or returns it. Returned points go back to the manager to fix, and the head of audit gives the final approval. QC inspectors have their own screens for supplier lots. Who can approve is decided by team membership, so the same rules apply on every audit.

The QC module is built around a supplier lot. Each lot carries the purchase order, the SKU, the product, the lot size and the quantity offered for inspection. An office team works from a web screen to bring lots in and assign them to inspectors, who see their lots on the mobile app.

At the lot, the inspector records how many pieces were checked, assembled, accepted, rejected or sent for rework, along with the critical, major and minor defects found. Rejections and rework each need a reason and photos, and the inspection is stamped with time and location. The lot then gets a final status of accepted or rejected.

Once a lot is closed, a QC report is generated as a PDF and sent to the recipients Urban Ladder has set up for that part of the business. The supplier's response and remarks can be recorded against the same lot, so the inspection and the follow-up sit in one place.

The first audit screens were built for managers, and the screens the audit head uses to validate and approve were built the next day. The audit module was later rebuilt as a single mobile app covering all four audit families.

Changes kept landing as the process was walked through. By late August 2026 the audit chain ended in a head of audit approval, and the auditor's re-review showed the manager's corrective photos alongside the original finding.

The QC module followed the same pattern. Inspector accounts were created and the first supplier lots were loaded within days, each one sized against Urban Ladder's own sampling tables.