By all means I hear you on the differences and especially w.rt. margins. I disagree tho that managing sales and customers is any different across any forms of sales.
satisfaction is from built up anticipation before receiving the goods. for the life of the product you will virtually never be as satisfied as that first impression let’s you be.
Tim Stamps is selling boards because we the erBB are hyping him. Maybe only a handful a year because of this place but he paid $0 directly to surfer for that advertisement. All he did was answer emails and charge a fair price and keep his customers happy and coming back.
IMO, from a business and customer service standpoint, yes, in a way business is business, and good or bad service is good or bad service.
However, the surfboard business is a strange one.
Think about it, the amazons of surfboards, CI, LOST, FW,JS, etc, the largest of them may make up to 3000 boards(units) per month. These guys financially may be able to honor a return policy similar to amazon, however all of the other smaller mid size board makers out there, probably couldn't afford to have those policies. So, for them, a policy to make a board right, as in
@ChaseTMP's case, (fix nose blem, and maybe give a discount or % $return for the flat rail((which could be shaped that way on purpose??or floated with resin to bring true?)) seems reasonable to me. Not a brand new board. That's just crazy talk. Now if the board had paint hiding something, totally wrong graphics or paint, crooked box, crooked fin, that I can see making a replacement board for. Espevcially At this point it's been ridden many times.
How's the builder supposed to fix the blems and resale after it's been used?
Unfortunately this ig/social media state we are in makes a board builder that much more under a microscope for even the smallest of fixable problem, that any kook can just blow up cause, really he doesn't like the board and how it works, not because of a couple repairable blems, again, IMO.
Stamps is selling boards not because of the few here on the erbb, but because he makes world class shapes, has a good business model, has a loyal following, and has talented pro's riding his equipment all over the world. Plus he's been shaping for many years, and to stay in this business and be successful you have to be able to persevere, create a working product, have some luck, and operate with sound business and have good people skills.
XTR has been around for a very long time, long time, so I'm sure he'll make it right. Javier should've been given the opportunity to fix the problem before it was ridden, not many times after, regardless of what anothe factory employees are seeing/saying. IMO