Rick Turner
Well-known member
Just had a customer return a uke because it didn't meet the agreed upon specs. So I went back to the original, extremely detailed work order, and checked off all the specifications. Everything was as per the work order...which had been sent to the customer. Checked it twice. Had one of my luthiers triple check me. Everything was exactly as on the work order.
Turns out that the customer did not understand the words "binding" and "purfling", and he was expecting something different. How different? I still don't know for sure.
We're obviously going to have to go through an education process with every customer. And we're also eliminating even the possibility of options like "tortoise binding with tortoise purfling" because I think it will wind up looking slightly weird with a glue line and mis-matched pattern. Hoping for black on black for this customer, so the effect is like double wide binding.
And then there are the tuners where what was on the work order but misunderstood; it's just that sometimes we go with bright nickel plating, sometimes there's a slightly more expensive option of using Gotoh's "antique" nickel tuners. Both are nickel.
So...here I go...with a major bunch of verbiage coming up in order to excruciatingly detail all our options, define terms, etc.
Turns out that the customer did not understand the words "binding" and "purfling", and he was expecting something different. How different? I still don't know for sure.
We're obviously going to have to go through an education process with every customer. And we're also eliminating even the possibility of options like "tortoise binding with tortoise purfling" because I think it will wind up looking slightly weird with a glue line and mis-matched pattern. Hoping for black on black for this customer, so the effect is like double wide binding.
And then there are the tuners where what was on the work order but misunderstood; it's just that sometimes we go with bright nickel plating, sometimes there's a slightly more expensive option of using Gotoh's "antique" nickel tuners. Both are nickel.
So...here I go...with a major bunch of verbiage coming up in order to excruciatingly detail all our options, define terms, etc.
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