The Whole Sorry Towel Saga

The funny thing about this post is that i actually started writing it months and months ago but then I discarded it as I thought I was perhaps accusing someone of being a bit hopeless unfairly. Turns out I was right on the money though.

Tasmania is hosting the Australian 3 Days Orienteering carnival at easter time. It’s actually an 8 day event split into two multi-day competitions - The Easter 3 Day and the Bay of Fires 3 Day.  

As my regular readers will know I’m fussy about prizes. I believe it’s not hard to create decent prizes for people who have spent heaps of cash entering and travelling to an event.  The best way to ensure there are good prizes is to put myself in charge of them, so I did.   With 55 seperate classes in each event I need to find something that wouldn’t break the budget. In the end I settled on towels with the event logo on them.  We’d received towels as prizes back in 2010 in Canberra and I really liked them.  We also have a great logo for this event as a smart person actually hired a graphic designer back in the early stages of planning. Combine the two and voila - prizes done!

So I got some quotes and settled on an Australian based international textile company.  Let’s call them Kimba. Here’s some of their blurb.

.. sounds good - what could go wrong?

Initially I got quotes for beach towels for both events, but the sales rep emailed just a day later to say she had mis-quoted and it would be $1 or so per towel more ($16.50 each).  This company was still about $5 per towel cheaper than the others I’d investigated but in order to keep within my budget I decided to downgrade the BOF event to the smaller gym towels. Wanting to get a figure for the total cost quickly I rang the company for a quote for the gym towels.  It was 8.95. The next day I emailed my original rep for a quote for the same thing (to get it in written format) and she quoted me $3 LESS than I’d had over the phone from someone else - i.e. $5.95 rather than 8.95.  huh I thought to myself - I’d better lock down this price before she discovered the next mistake she’d probably made.

It’s not super obvious but the logo has been enlarged to the edge of the towel - this wasn’t too bad for the A3Days towel (top)(although I preferred having white space around it), but for the BOF gym towel they’d actually stretched the logo so it reached the edges of the skinny towel.  This was not acceptable. I immediately got back to the sales rep who insisted that on our initial phone call that I’d asked for the logo to be as big as it could be on the towels.  That might have been the case but that wasn’t the approved artwork I’d signed off on, and it is NEVER ok to stretch logos.  So I refused at approve the sample print. The Sales Rep got really snooty with me but I stood my ground. Then she revealed that they had actually already printed the entire order - i.e. 270 towels - so they were all going to waste.  Despite the pressure being applied I held my ground and they agreed to reprint them.

The is when I wrote my original blog post noting similarities between the sales rep I  was working with for the towels and the sales-rep I worked with in 2015 when I needed 100 volunteers t-shirts printed. The t-shirt sales-rep kept forgetting our order and was always talking about embroidery when we had always wanted printing, and generally seemed to not remember anything. Despite being completely different people working for different companies, they were both similarly hopeless.  But I felt bad after writing it so I didn’t publish it.  

About 3 weeks later I got another call from the Kimba Sales Rep, again URGENTlY asking me to approve the artwork. this time they didn’t send me a photo, but just sent the original artwork that I’d approved.  That seemed to be ok - i.e. it was exactly the same as it was last time so I said fine. Presumably they then completed the print run and shipped off the towels.  That was one of the things about working with this sales rep - every single email was marked as URGENT yet I never got an acknowledgement when I immediately replied to these urgent emails.

Anyway - the towels arrived in Melbourne a few weeks later and the company rang up to ask me to send the payment for the final shipping from Melbourne to Hobart. I asked the accounts person to send me a photo of the towels before I paid  (just in case), and she opened up one of the gym-towel boxes and sent me a photo. It looked ok so I transferred the last of the payment and waited excitedly for delivery.

Yep. The big black word ‘ Tasmania’ was missing.  What a complete stuff up. How could the sales person, or whoever was in charge of my account completely fail to check the towels before they left China.  Duh.

Later on that day Jon came home from work and immediately noticed that they’d misprinted the black on the gym towels too - it had all shifted 2 cm to the left.  Aside from giving the text a messy left alignment it had also meant the little circle which was supposed to indicate where the event was being held, had moved from St Helens to Bridport. 

I rang the company and they immediately agreed to reprint the 170  A3 Days towels. After a further exchange of emails they reluctantly agreed to reprint the gym towels too.

A few weeks later (after storing the 11 boxes of dud towels under the house) I got a message from the Sales Rep asking if I wanted to buy the dud towels at a ‘special’ price given how much money they (Kimba) had lost. as I was still hoping to receive the final correct towels I didn’t want to send an email explaining that the loss of money was entirely their own fault and there was no way I was giving them any more money.  Instead I responded politely that as we were giving them out as prizes, we couldn’t sell off the dud ones as that would devalue the real ones.  I got no response but a week or so later the final and correct towels arrived.  Phew!

So Kimba, the company with “extensive experience spanning some 25 years in the textile industry both as manufacturers and importers of towel and home textiles.” had printed a total of 810 towels for our 270 towel order. They’d shipped 540 of these all the way to Hobart.  What a debacle.  All of it could have been avoided with some basic checking. The whole process started late in August 2017 and the final towels arrived  on about the 15th of December. It’s just lucky I decided to get started on my job early!

As a contrast to my dodgy Australian experiences, the sales person I am working with now to get 200 Tasmanian Orienteering Championship medals, and the person I worked with back in 2015 to do the 1000 cow-bells have been really good. They are both sales reps for Chinese companies (based in China) They acknowledge each and every email I send, and so far (although we haven’t received the medals yet) there haven't been any stuff-ups. I felt briefly guilty for going direct to China but one of the Australian places I got a quote from  (for about double the Chinese quote) mentioned that the lead time might be a bit longer as Chinese New Year meant a 2 week closure for the chinese factory.  So they were getting them done in China anyway.