Lifetime Warranties:
Time To End The Charade
by Mitch Weber |
|
November 21, 2005-- I hadn't seen Nena Kelty in many years when we
bumped into each other unexpectedly in a store out in the valley
one day. We tried to catch up on each others lives quickly, the
way that you do when you haven't seen an old friend for a decade
or two. She said her husband, my first real employer/mentor as
a young man, was doing well. She said that although the passage
of time had begun to take its toll, he was still getting out
on his road bike from time to time, and his spirit was still
strong. I mentioned that I thought it must make them both happy
to see that the company she and her husband had begun in their
garage in 1952 had survived into the new millennium. She allowed
that it did, but I saw a surprising look of pain flash across
Nena’s face for a moment and then I knew why, as she explained,
"the only thing that bothers us is that we haven't been
able to completely honor the lifetime warranty we promised our
customers, that makes us really sad." I wasn't sure but
I almost thought I saw the eyes of this strong, proud and good
woman begin to water up, so I quickly changed the subject.
You see, when
the late Dick Kelty sold Kelty Pack Inc. to Boston-based
CML in 1972, one of the conditions of the sale had been that
CML would continue to offer and honor Kelty’s "no questions
asked" lifetime "repair or replace" warranty.
Dick remained Chairman of Kelty in those years, the period when
I worked for him. We had a seamstress --the first seamstress
Dick had hired some 30 years earlier as a matter of fact-- who's
only job was to repair packs and other items. It didn't matter
what had gone wrong, 90% or more of the items sent in were repaired
or replaced for free, and even stuff ripped apart by bears or
other critters would be fixed up for a nominal charge. That was
just the way Dick Kelty did business. And it was good business,
the result was that Kelty customers were fiercely loyal and the
brand was considered the Rolls-Royce of its then-booming industry.
Dick retired in 1978 and Kelty Pack eventually
came under the ownership of American Recreation Products, a firm
no longer bound to administer and honor Kelty’s "lifetime
warranty" in the same way that Dick and Nena had. As is
now very common, to the point of being almost universal, "lifetime"
became the lifetime of the product, not the lifetime of the user,
with the length of the product's useful life being determined
by the manufacturer.
There may be others today, but off hand
the only outdoor company I know of that still offers and honors
a "no questions asked" lifetime repair or replace warranty
is Patagonia, a firm still run by its founder, Dick Kelty’s
longtime friend and colleague, Yvon Chouinard. This is probably
not a coincidence, for these two men started out when the industry
they chose to throw their hats into was more about passion than
business. Never mind that passion, just like Dick and Nena's
warranty policy, is and always was good business… but that
is another subject.
The question today is this: Is it time
to put an end to the charade that has come to define the terms
of most "lifetime" warranties? At least some retailers
think so. A few years ago in the annual Outdoor Retail Survey
conducted by the trade journal SNEWS, one of the questions posed
was this: "Looking back, which product would you nominate
as the greatest sales-failure of the year -- one that needs to
die a quiet death or go back to the drawing board?" One
of the handful of published answers from specialty shop owners
was "the lifetime warranty."
The industry standard for these warranties
has rendered them, in the eyes of some at least, little more
than a misleading marketing ploy. Buyers often think they are
getting something they are not. "Lifetime warranty"
has become little more than a shell game, with the operator of
the game in complete control, making the rules and moving the
virtual hidden pellet around at will. Definitions of what constitututes
a "lifetime" vary wildly, often being determined by
what the manufacturer thinks it can get away with while still
making the lifetime warranty claim. One famous example of this
comes from the computer industry. The publication InfoWorld investigated
what different vendors in the diskette business (remember those?)
meant by a lifetime guarantee. It was found that one manufacturer
defined "lifetime" as lasting until the product failed.
Yes, you read that right, their disks carried a lifetime warranty
against failure which protected the buyer right up until the
time the product actually failed. As weird as this sounds, today
many lifetime warranties in the outdoor industry are very similar
in their application.
What was originally intended as a consumer
protection, designed to foster confidence in buyers and establish
a bond of trust between users and gear makers, has been turned
on its head. Today, "lifetime" warranties protect the
manufacturer, not the end user. Insanely, this often comes the
expense of their most important customers: core users. Many of
these hardcore users are what Malcolm Gladwell called "connectors
and mavens" in his seminal and important book "The
Tipping Point." These are the people who want to know everything
about the gear they and others use, they are the people who use
the gear most, and as a consequence they are the people others
look to for advice before making purchases.
Here's a real life example: a pro patroller
buys a pair of high-end leather work gloves from a manufacturer
who offers a "lifetime" warranty. He works a 40 hour
week, 8 hours a day. After about a hundred days on the job his
expensive gloves have multiple split seams and he's tired of
duct taping them. Our pro patroller tries to return them to the
maker under the warranty, only to find out his "lifetime"
warranty is actually more like five months. Now he’s really
bummed and tells all his friends. Worse, he posts his experience
online to a message board where some 50,000 unique visitors will
stop by in a single month. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of
those visitors being "mavens and connectors" who read
every gear discussion so as to be informed when their friends
ask "who makes the best gloves?"
Now of course our pro patroller is an extreme
example, but what about the thousands of core telemark and backcountry
skiers who get out 100 days or more in a typical season? Does
anyone doubt they are unhappy to find out the gear they bought
with a "lifetime" warranty, and for which they paid
top dollar, is actually expected and guaranteed by the maker
to last just one season?
Some of these issues were discussed last
spring in an article in the retailer and manufacturer oriented
GearTrends
magazine, a publication of the aforementioned SNEWS team.
Author Jim Moss concluded his piece with the following:
Lifetime warranties are great sales
incentives and that's the reason many manufacturers have been
adding them. But that doesn't mean they should be taken at face
value or left for the consumer to interpret as he or she thinks
is correct.
Okay, but there's just one problem: the
very thing that makes "lifetime" warranties wonderful
"sales incentives" is the same thing that ends up angering
a manufacturer's most sought-after customer, the core user. Simply
put, most of the "sales incentive" derives from the
fact that the customer is being mislead.
Moss continues:
It behooves the retailer and sales
staff to be utterly clear about what a warranty covers, how strong
it is, and what its exceptions and parameters are. Manufacturers
too must take responsibility to explain to their dealers point-by-point
the details of their warranties. That way, every sale results
in a satisfied customer who not only returns to the store, but
also tells friends and family what a great experience the purchase
was.
True enough, but the term "lifetime
warranty" will always carry a certain connotation with most
of the buying public, no matter how many explanations are offered.
The only way to overcome this would be for manufacturers who
offer anything other that a "no questions asked, repair
or replace, lifetime of the buyer warranty" to state clearly
the following: "our lifetime warranty means we guarantee
our products for their expected useful life, not your life, and
we decide how long that expected useful life is, not
you." This would be an accurate statement, but it's
not likely to happen because then the entire raison d'être
of the "lifetime warranty" evaporates.
The GearTrends piece by Jim Moss is actually
pretty good in addressing the legal issues and technical intricacies
of these kinds of guarantees, though what's missing in the discussion
is the fact that a real lifetime warranty is not something to
be fudged, massaged, slanted or distorted into a mere sales incentive.
It's something much deeper. For people like Dick and Nena Kelty,
Yvon Chounaird and others, it was and is nothing less than the
forging of a very special relationship between them and the buyers
of their crafted goods. Not only does the way most of these "lifetime"
warranties have evolved work against the important goal of instilling
confidence in core using mavens and connectors, in a very real
way it dishonors some of the truly great men and women upon who's
shoulders the outdoor industry was built and who made it special. |