Ai_1 wrote:
Slowman wrote:
Ai_1 wrote:
I object to anything that appears to be a non-optional insurance policy.i think there's another lens through which one could view this. when i began as a manufacturer, we sold a wetsuit. it was my view that a wetsuit ought to last 2 years. that was a reasonable expectation. so, we made that a policy. we gave a 2 year, no-fault warranty. if anything happened to it, regardless of fault, within 2 years of purchase, we would replace it or repair it. in fact, that was the theme of the first ads we ran. from my perspective, it wasn't a gimmick, or a policy we made our users fund, it was that we could do it, because we had our own factory stateside, it didn't cost us that much to make sure you had 2 years worth of wetsuit use, and it gave our customers peace of mind. but what it mostly was, i think, is that i had gotten my own hide chapped because of products that failed, so it was my own sort of back atcha. i got calls from wetsuit manufacturers, not just in triathlon but in surf, mad at me that i was forcing the industry into a policy it could not sustain, but i saw that as a weakness of customer service. if there wasn't a reasonable expectation that your wetsuit would last 2 years, that was an implicit admittance of your product's lack of fitness.
I don't have any issue with warranties, on the contrary. However, a warranty is about the product being fit for purpose and free of defects. It doesn't generally intend to include misuse or accidental damage. i.e. the manufacturer is standing over their product, not the carefulness or competence of users. When the company offers to cover the cost of user errors or misfortunes, outside of their control or direct influence, I think it blurs the line between a warranty and built-in insurance. Again, I do see that when such "insurance" is provided in the form of a free replacement from the manufacturer and the policy is used to drive business and perhaps drive down cost via volume, it is more complex than simply bolting on a more conventional insurance policy you didn't want.
i think you might be overstating how much customer friendly policies cost. if your stuff pretty much never breaks, then it doesn't cost you much to offer a warranty, whether fault or no fault. we offered a 14-day exchange on our wetsuits, no questions asked, and you might think that would be costly, but we got maybe 5 wetsuits back a year on that policy, out of the 14,000 we made per year.
i can't speak for enve. in our case, we had an advantage. almost no one else made their own wetsuits. in most cases, a suit that got returned to the company got trashed. we rarely had to trash anything. that no-fault warranty didn't cost us nearly as much to perform as it would another wetsuit maker, so, you really weren't hostage to a charge - in the purchase price of a wetsuit - that you didn't elect.
secondly, it worked. this was a brand new category. most triathletes had never had a wetsuit. didn't know what to expect out of this product. but again, in enve's case, i can't speak to their motivations. i would only note that, like us, they have a stateside factory, and that may effect the calculus. it's hard to know how to gauge warranties when you don't make your own stuff, and you have a huge wait time for new product, and you don't know how much to hold back.
Dan Empfield
aka Slowman