It’s 2019. You’re the first player to offer a full system in a market that is ripe. All of your product is ordered via the web. You have your customers’ phone and emails. You have a product that does not meet expectations. You make a change to said product. Said product is related to a person’s safety at height. At the time the failure was discovered, and gen2 was decided upon, there at most were hundreds, maybe thousands of platforms in the wild.
The cost of the gen1 mold and gen2 mold are sunk costs.
At the inflection point of deciding to build a gen2, the decision was made to only let people know about the issue with gen1 here, and on social media. The cost of crafting an email letting every single customer know about the issue would have been a few hours of a principle’s time.
The cost to offer a replacement to every single gen1 owner if they decided that is what they wanted, would have been in the neighborhood of 10k if I’m not off on how many were out. That’s probably high.
The cost of a mandatory recall would’ve been significantly higher, but still probably less than 50k.
A calculated business decision was made to simply float the issue on social media.
In my opinion that was a poor business decision. Nipping this in the bud when you have majority market share, and the cost to do so is so low, makes complete sense. The upside of ‘ignoring’ it, whether it was financially or emotionally driven, seems limited. The risks are extreme, and existential to the business.
The upside of mandatory recall, voluntary swap out, or at worst total effort to inform all customers of the issues at play, is enormous. I’ve given up on thinking you can keep lazy or ignorant people from killing themselves. But the perception that you can’t be trusted or put profit before people’s lives, when you’re in a business that sells gear that holds people’s lives in the balance, is incredibly costly.
These types of decisions sink small businesses every day. I can totally see why the decision was made to handle the situation that way. Myself, and quite a few other folks were urging a more cautious, risk averse approach to this issue. For me personally, it was because I wanted to see someone drive market innovation so I get cool gear to hunt with. And to a slightly lesser extent, I love business and like to see the right moves made.
The fact that it continues to pop up simply reinforces all that I’ve said. It’s still not too late to clean it up a little. But the damage to perception and brand likely exceeds the up front cost of resolving it the right way. And if someone actually does die or get seriously hurt because of this failure mode, the cost will most definitely close the doors.
There are a ton of other things at play in this conversation. But sticking to the topic at hand, it’s a real bummer it was handled the way it was. I hope for all involved - the business, the consumers, and our little community, nothing major comes of it.