Rick doesn't have a SBFans account - so he asked me to post this.
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I have never responded on the boards to positive or negative remarks by customers. When I hit send, I will not respond again. As a rule, I do not think it is professional to address things publicly.
However, it is necessary to respond to continued assaults from a couple of board members.
Over the last 2 years, we have taken in $400,000-$500,000 with paypal and have only had disputes with the Shinetime boys - Jaime Lopeman and Mike Johnson. This is a custom business and mistakes or miscommunications will happen. When dealing with reasonable people, some type of settlement is easily made.
Let's talk Treb and his shipping issue. So everyone knows, he got his shirts, on time, at the agreed to price, at the agreed shipping price, and has no complaint about the shirts. His complaint is that he paid for rush shipping and we grounded it to him - on time.
About a year ago, I brought in a consultant. Within 15 minutes, he saw that we lost over $30,000 in shipping. The reason was very simple. If we miss a ground ship deadline, we regularly upgrade shipping and pay for the difference. This is a practice that we still regularly do.
Without getting into detail, there are many variables into how and when projects are sewn. Thread color and delivery date are 2 very important issues. If possible, a pair of sewers can produce 5-10 more shirts a day if you limit their thread changes. It is common for jobs (especially rush jobs) to get thrown in early when we have the same thread color. When that happens, their jobs are done early and, if possible, we can save on their shipping.
On the back end, rush jobs push other jobs to or after their deadline. To get the customer his job on time, we expedite their shipping. In our eyes, the customer that got his job pushed back should not be penalized because we pressed his deadline. So, it costs us more on the back end for those customers to receive their shirts on time.
So, I have come up with 5 options - you figure out which is most fair.
1. All the customers pay the agreed to price for their shirts and shipping.
2. We refund the rush customer the difference in shipping and charge the customer who waited patiently for his shirts extra to hit his deadline.
3. We refund the rush customer the difference in shipping and miss the other customer's deadline.
4. We refund the rush customer the difference in shipping and we eat the expedited shipping charge. (Please note that is what we did in the past and I lost $30,000 in shipping last year.)
5. We refund the rush customer the difference in shipping and Treb agrees to pay the difference in rush charges.
This was explained to Treb on a couple of occasions. Either he is too stupid to figure it out or he is purposely not telling the whole story. I played ball with Treb - and he is no dummy.
Jaime Lopemann. (Shinetime)
After his initial order, he did a total of 39 garments. In order to make these garments, we did 77 mockups. He was NEVER charged an art charge. We would make a garment, then he would make more changes to mockups. It was very common to order from different mockups - old and new. See mockup 9 and 10 below to see the minor changes.
The problem is that he would order a shirt, then make repeated changes for his next order. Once a master file is made, the production staff has to figure out what minor changes he made to make 1 more shirt. Due to mix ups, 6 garments were given for free and 18 were discounted.
We have a reward/penalty system. Every shirt that passes through the shop, every person that works on it gets a small reward. For every mistake, the person making the mistake gets a fine. We had to waive the penalty on his jobs or no one would do his jobs.
Believe it or not, the last order we did for Jaime on January 15, 2011. Based on his posts, wouldn't you think we are constantly making mistakes on current orders?
Mike Johnson - the other Shinetime.
When we stopped producing for Lopemann, Johnson begged us to do his work, because he "wasn't the *******" (His words, not mine.)
Our problems with Johnson started on a rush order. He ordered 2 shirts and 2 pants with a delivery in less than 10 days. (I think it was actually 3 days). We guaranteed him the shirts, but the pants are sewn with a contractor and they take 1 week to sew. We said we would try. We overnighted the shirts, but the pants were done late and we grounded them out (at our expense).
When he got the package, he called our office. It was after hours. We have 10 extensions and he left a message on all 10 answering machines. I had 3 messages on my machine. In all seriousness, does a rational human being leave at least 13 messages after hours on answering machines?
When he called the next morning, I told him, "You are the biggest pain in the ass that we ever dealt with. Don't call us. Don't email us. Don't text us. We will never do another job for you." He called me a big man from Milwaukee and if he ever saw me on a softball diamond he would kick my ass. When he called me a douche bag and told me to suck his ****. I hung up.
When he called back he told me that if I did not give him back his money he would dispute every paypal and blow us up on the boards. We did not cave to his threat of extortion and guess what happened next.
Paypal ruled in our favor on all of the disputes. Then we got a reversal for $2800.
Mr. Johnson found out about a loophole in Paypal. If you pay through paypal with a credit card, then call the credit card and say you did not get what you ordered, the credit card company will give you back your money. Paypal must return the money to the credit card company and pull it from the seller. There is no dispute. Paypal can not even tell the seller who the credit card company is. The only recourse is to sue the buyer in civil court. The supervisor at paypal is upset because this is a growing problem and it usurps the ability of paypal to settle disputes.
There were 2 jobs that Mr. Johnson got his money back. On the first one, he wanted "Dodger blue". He said our color was 2 or 3 shades off. (To be honest, I have been doing color work for almost 20 years and am unsure what "dodger blue" or 3 shades off mean.) Because he was unhappy, we discounted his next order. In addition, he ordered more of the same shirts and wanted the same color to match. These orders were on March 4 and March 17, 2011.
In June, he filed the complaint with his credit card company and got the reversal. In addition to his money, we were charged settlement fees and other fees. Since my only recourse is in civil court, I will sue for him for what he paid, court costs, settlement fees and the discount he received in settlement for the wrong "Dodger blue".
He got his product in March and it is now October. He finally agreed verbally to pay $500 a month until the bill is paid in full. We emailed him a form to print out and mail back to us. He said he doesn't have a printer. This is the crap that we have had to deal with.
We have been accused of being unclassy. We have not gone public. We have made numerous settlements with these guys. We have put up with the barrages and mistruths.
If Mr. Johnson does not agree to the terms, we will sue him. We will win. He will pay more if we go to court. And we will not talk about it on the boards.
I have said my piece. Please read a couple of times before you react. Then tell me…
What good does it do to respond on the boards? Depending on how you read it, I either called my customers misinformed or keyboard cowboys who extort companies by brazenly misrepresenting the truth to get discounts or items for free.
I just exposed myself to have my words parsed and misconstrued.
I just told you how to screw a vendor and the shortfalls of PayPal.
I have over $1 million invested in a company and am arguing with guys that have a $500 computer and an attitude - that have nothing to risk by flippantly writing negative things so they get the satisfaction of hurting a person or company that they have never met.
I run the risk of personal barrage that I will not respond to.
One final note. My dad recently fell down and broke his hip. I just left the rehab center that he may never leave. My wife will find out on Tuesday the results of the lump they found on her breast. And here I am, spending 3 hours disputing the unwarranted claims by a couple of psychologically damaged mental midgets - one who we did not match a made up color 7 months ago and one that our production staff did not realize he changed
the size of a star on a single shirt order 9 months ago.
I have tried to figure out why they just don't switch vendors. If you read their posts, would you do work for them?
Have fun.
Rick Marino
