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Private White Rant

emiratiAL

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Let me start by saying that I really like Private White. What with their commitment to quality; the cut and silhouette of the product; in addition to their endeavour to source everything from within 50km of their factory. However, I've had - or am having - a very disappointing experience with them where the incorrect care label was placed in the jacket, subsequently resulting in the jacket being damaged quite extensively in a 30c wash, when it should have been dry cleaned. That the jacket is so nice is probably the reason I'm so gutted about it's untimely demise. Besides this, I've found their customer care lacking, taking a week to get back to me requesting that I send the jacket back. When I phoned to follow up they seemed pretty indifferent.

I'm possibly jumping the gun by getting overly irritated by this, but has anyone experienced a situation like this before, and is it possible for the factory to rectify this?
 

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Substanceoverstyle

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Them taking a week (I assume 5 working days) to get back at you is not lacking customer care IMO. People nowadays seem to expect a response within 24 hours, while the might be standard for many large chain companies, for smaller business a week is not that unreasonable. Sending it back also sounds pretty logical. It might not be salveable, in which case you should get a refund though.
 

BPL Esq

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Doesn't seem like any major customer service failure at this stage. They made a mistake with the label, and it would be reasonable for them to refund you the cost and shipping and/or send you a new one. When they asked you to send it back, did they indicate what their plan was to resolve the issue?
 

emiratiAL

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Them taking a week (I assume 5 working days) to get back at you is not lacking customer care IMO. People nowadays seem to expect a response within 24 hours, while the might be standard for many large chain companies, for smaller business a week is not that unreasonable. Sending it back also sounds pretty logical. It might not be salveable, in which case you should get a refund though.
Doesn't seem like any major customer service failure at this stage. They made a mistake with the label, and it would be reasonable for them to refund you the cost and shipping and/or send you a new one. When they asked you to send it back, did they indicate what their plan was to resolve the issue?

Thanks for the feedback. You're right, I'm overreacting or have unrealistic expectations, probably as I'm pissed off that I've effectively ruined my jacket by my own hand.

Anyway, they never indicated what their plan was, when I followed up after a week of hearing nothing I was told by their customer rep that they would give it to the production team to look at. To me that wasn't a particularly satisfactory answer, however the jacket is with them now and I'll await what their plan is once they've assessed it.
 

Shetterd

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I have a shacket from them which I bought a few years ago and it has the same exact issue. The care label is wrong. It says to machine wash but when I emailed them to confirm this they said dry clean only.

Another, smaller, point is that I bought the peacoat a while ago and it came with zero spare buttons. They said when and if I needed one I could contact them to get it, which may work well but is just a bit of a pain especially if you are not UK based.

I do love both garments, it's all just slightly irritating details.
 

usctrojans31

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Thanks for sharing. It's these logistical issues that are always the challenge for scaling businesses. Hopefully they resolve it and can fix this stuff moving forward.
 

emiratiAL

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I have a shacket from them which I bought a few years ago and it has the same exact issue. The care label is wrong. It says to machine wash but when I emailed them to confirm this they said dry clean only.

This is the issue I found puzzling. If I was in charge of production at PW and discovered (via upset customers) that wrong labels were being incorrectly placed - potentially exposing the business to refunds / rework / reputational damage etc. - then I would be very rapidly attempting to establish how widespread an issue this is, if it's still happening, and how to ensure it can't happen in the future.

Perhaps this exercise is going on in the background and I am unaware, or perhaps it's an acceptable error in large scale production (say 1 garment per 1000 or something) but I was suprised about their fairly casual attitude to the situation.

When I phoned after a week of radio silence and asked what the plan was, their response was that the photos would be passed on to their production team. Perhaps I'm going all Karen style here and getting worked up into a frenzy over what is a fairly trivial issue, but if a client at my work said we were producing poor quality work and asked me what the plan was to resolve it, and my response was to say I've sent it onto someone else then I suspect they would want to rip my head off, in conjunction with my own management once they found out about my behaviour!
 

emiratiAL

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Well, yes, with the benefit of hindsight it seems silly, but if in doubt refer to the care label...
 

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