This one still makes me wince. A buyer in Italy ordered a full container, mixed paddles and balls, biggest single order we'd had that quarter. Daniel handled it and everything looked smooth.
The handles were meant to be a navy leather wrap. Somewhere between the message and the workshop it got read as black. To be fair navy and black look nearly the same under our shop lights, which is part of how it happened.
We found out when the buyer asked for a production photo before shipping. Good thing he did. Daniel saw the photo, went pale, and walked straight down to the bench to check. Black, not navy. About 900 paddles wrapped wrong.
I'll be honest, for an hour we thought the order was gone. Re-wrapping that many by hand was days of work and the ship date was close. The buyer was not happy and I don't blame him.
We made a call: pulled three people off other jobs, re-wrapped through the weekend, and ate the extra cost ourselves. It went out only two days late. The buyer noticed we didn't argue about it and he's still with us.
What changed after that: any color now gets a physical swatch taped to the order sheet, with a photo sent to the buyer before we wrap a single handle. No more guessing from a screen, because navy on your monitor is not navy on my leather.
Mundane fix, but it's saved us twice since. A buyer in Australia caught a wrong stitch color from the swatch photo before we'd touched the leather. Five minute fix instead of a five day disaster.
