Dear Panthera
Thank you but we have nothing to celebrate.
Here at The Laundry Alternative, we work hard to make our best. It means our products must perform well, they must be safe to use and they must last as much as possible.
Programmed obsolescense is completely forbidden in our company. We don't say that only to convince customers to buy our products, it is truth I live every single day here, discussing tiny details with the company CEO (Corey Tournet), our engineering team and our production.
Different from dozens of companies that sell those terrible products on Ebay, we really develop our products, we control every step, from the very first sketch to the final product.
For example, my friend Kevin (Revvinkevin) has the final prototype SCAW2GEN in his house. That was the very last unit we made, then it was sacrificed repeating hundreds of tests with all sort of measuring instruments connected to it only to make sure we did it right before I authorized the production manager to give the "green light" on production.
In less than a year on the market, we sold over 10 thousand units.
All our procedures and attitude are thinking on CONSUMER first, for this reason we have the 3-year hassle-free warranty (literally hassle-free as you could see.
Unfortunately you had an issue with your product (By the way an issue we are already aware and related to FedEx and it's "not gentle at all" handling.
We could think of PROFIT first and say "We will ship you a brake cable for free, because we are very generous, now you deal with the hassle to replace the part and you also have to pay for the shipping." The result would be great for the CFO, ok, we would have more profit (no loss) in ONE unit. Would you praise and recommend our company to your friends and relatives? Would you trust us again if we did just the bare minimum required by consumer protection laws? I bet you would hate us forever! How many new customers we would loose? how many units we wouldn't sell?
I said it is sad because everything is wrong in the US market. The Laundry Alternative shouldn't be praised for doing the right thing. Ina perfect world, all our competitors would do the same, they would have in mind that 100% of whatever machines in the world someday will fail and behing a broken whatever machine there is a customer that trusted our company and invested his or her money trusting it was a good deal and an appliance that was built to last.
Other thing I loved in our company is that The Laundry Alternative is growing fast, but we use technology to continue with that "family company" feel. We are a family company, we don't trust call centers. When somebody calls our toll-free number, the system transfers the call straight to my phone or the CEO's phone. I designed the products, I know every millimetric detail about each one of the products and I can troubleshoot without reading a "canned" text on a computer screen.
Of course it's not always possible to answer all the calls, lots of people complain they reach the voice mail most of the times, but I call back. I also reply all the emails. And I need this intimate contact with the customers because thanks to consumers like you I can know what people want.
The SCAW2GEN was released on the marked a few months ago, and guess what, I'm already finishing the SCAW3GEN project because i realized I could make it even better.
We are now working very hard to extend our warranty. Taking our quality standards to even higher levels and offer a full 7 year "hassle-free" warranty, the same way the 3-year warranty is now. If something goes wrong, we will never try to fix the product, instead, we will always ship a brand new unit at absolutely no cost for the customer, unless the failure is something really silly, like a faulty fill hose that an ordinary customer can replace using no tools or technical knowledge.
We also love to think out of the box. Something that our competitors forgot how to do. Have you noticed that no matter what brand, washing machines nowadays all use the same beaten path? It doesn't satisfy the stock market investors when a company spends money CREATING. Why create? let's just use something similar to our competitor, change one or other thing to prevent being sued for violating patents. It's easier than have an old school designer building the very first prototype using clay and epoxy. We do that here, I do that, it's MY work to create, it's MY work to make good products and coordinate everything with other designers and the engineers to make sure the final result will be much more than "acceptable" if I fail, i will drag down the whole company with me. It's a horrible responsibility, but luckily i am not alone, I have a great team with me.
By the way, the company is not Brazilian. The Laundry Alternative is 100% American. Coincidently I was born in Brazil and the other coincidence is that one of our production plants is in Brazil. (We also have a plant in China and a new partner in England) We are also negotiating an old appliance manufacturer plant here in the US, so we can remodel and modernize that plant to move our warehouse from New Hampshire and finally shut down the Chinese plant and transfer our production to the USA, generating more jobs for our people.
Spoiler alert:
HATL washers (i said washersssss) coming soon.
