I'm certainly better educated about all this than I was at the time of my purchase. I can only speculate as to their learning curve.
– Offer "lifetime warranty" because you know it sounds great, and as sole judge of whether the frame has been in some way abused, don't sweat the fine print.
– As you say, count on a certain percentage of people selling it before too long anyway and therefore voiding the warranty
I would suggest, however, that the titanium mystique attracts a higher than normal number of people after their "dream" or "forever" bike. Which is clearly a problem. Perhaps lovers of atomic #22 with such notions should be offered counselling and a gentle nudge out the door rather than being enabled. Speaking of which, check out
this guarantee. (Maybe they're good for it. Nice copywriting at any rate. "We'll put things right" is what you want to hear.)
What do you mean time's up?Entropy's a bitch– Now that you've got your business on a more sure footing, start tempering people's expectations. Keep your fingers crossed there won't be enough legacy buyers like me to break the bank.
– When we do pop up, try to retroactively manage expectations.
I don't wish to be mysterious, but their treatment of me was more appalling than I can go into. You don't necessarily have to take my word on that to commiserate.
CommiserationsThey really should have given me a new frame in the first place, rather than welding it, particularly there (you can see the repair below the final break). Granted it would have been pushing it to expect a lifetime of replacements had there been further failures.
– Discover to your horror this thing called social media. Well, you can always block critics. That'll teach us, eh?
I guess, possibly depending on the manufacturer, people might want to think thrice before buying used ti – though now that you have I wish you many happy miles T42. Vickster across the road (via
my detour) too, on a lovely Condor Grand Fondo.
That circa 2000 Litespeed upthread, which covered plenty of terrain in the 11 years before the En*gma came along to bump it down the pecking order,
is still going. Even my el cheapo aluminium (oh the handwringing over alu!) Langster and little Dahon,
veteran of unforgiving London roads, have well outlived it. Now its only occupation is muse. If it wasn't for corona's lockdown on my peregrinations, the two of us would already have made the trip to the big city for even more adventures.
