THE CLIENT: A SUMMER CAMP

THE F-UP (STORY):

Each summer we work with a summer camp to supply custom lunch bags for each age group right before camp starts. With 10 different color bags for 10 groups, and each group a different size, it is always a rushed order to deliver the exact quantity of bags on time.

One year, the labeled bags arrived just 1 day before camp opened, with only one camp staff member available to handwrite each camper’s name on the bags. To assist, we sent two staff members from Liquid Screen Design to help label the hundreds of bags.

After a few hours, our staffers realized the camp’s staff member had mistakenly written the names on the orange bags with names meant for the blue bags. This resulted in extra orange bags and not enough blue bags for that group of campers.

THE LSD FIX:

Our staff that was at camp took the bags to one of our decorators who overnight printed over the mistake and then wrote the names on all the orange and blue lunch bags in the very early morning. Delivering all the correctly named lunch bags to camp by the time campers arrived for their first day at 9:00 AM.

THE CLIENT: A RACE

THE F-UP (STORY):

A customer placed an order with us for 25,000 die-cut logo stickers to hand out at a high-profile race event with many spectators. Their expectation was that the sticker design would have a transparent background.

Unfortunately, we did not realize this, and the stickers were printed standardly with a white background. This was clearly (pun intended) not caught in the proofing stage because as a static image proof, it did not indicate whether the background was white or transparent. The customer did not realize the mistake until they opened the box three days before the race.

THE LSD FIX:

We jumped on the problem immediately and had the 25,000 stickers reprinted on a transparent background and rush-shipped at our expense. Fortunately, the new stickers arrived with time to spare. We now make sure to confirm background preferences with every sticker order!

THE CLIENT: A SUMMER CAMP

THE F-UP (STORY):

Our client contacted us when they realized they hadn't ordered enough shirts for their campers, falling 20 shirts short just two days before camp. As we were rushing to get them additional shirts, they came back to us with a much bigger problem. The Hebrew on the shirts was misspelled. It was their mistake, but their board was very upset and they needed 1000 new shirts before camp started.

THE LSD FIX:

Our team got to work immediately! We corrected the Hebrew, contacted one of our decorators who could take the rush order, and sent a courier to pick up the blank shirts (about an hour and a half away) and deliver them to be printed.

Printing 1,000 shirts takes some time (especially when there are a lot of colors that need to dry). By the time the shirts were ready, there was only one way to get them to their destination in time for the first day of camp…fly them up to Upstate New York and deliver them ourselves! After exiting the plane and passing through security, our staff handed over the 1,000 shirts to the camp staff and then got the next flight back home.

Not your typical delivery but much faster than UPS or FedEx!

THE F-UP (STORY):

This is a big one! We work with several professional sports teams. Their branding requirements are always 100% on point. Shameless plug time - even if you are not a professional sports team, you should have strong branding guidelines - we can help with that at no additional cost.

They ordered 10,000 challenge coins to give away. Since the challenge coins were ordered with plenty of time, we got them from a great supplier that manufactures overseas. We received a pre-production proof of the coins from the supplier right before they shipped. Lo and behold, part of the design on their logo was missing! When we contacted the company to get them fixed, it was Chinese New Year and the manufacturer overseas would not be back in their factory until 2 days before our client needed them.

THE LSD FIX:

Finding an alternative vendor to make the coins would have been easy, but we were up against the clock. We put pressure on our original supplier to have them all reprinted and overnight shipped from overseas as soon as the factory opened back up. The client received their challenge coins in time without breaking a sweat (although we may have been sweating a little).

THE CLIENT: A NATIONAL NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION

THE F-UP (STORY):

We have a lot of nonprofit clients here at Liquid Screen Design- we love working with organizations whose missions align with our company values.

Our customer was having their national convention with delegations of professionals from around North America. They ordered 500 high-quality Bluetooth speakers to hand out to delegates at the registration table.

Two days before they were supposed to ship, our vendor informed us that the blank speakers had not arrived yet to be decorated and would not arrive in time for the event.

THE LSD FIX:

It was a late Thursday and their event was supposed to start Sunday, so we had to find a vendor that could ship custom speakers within 24 hours. In addition to the time crunch, the entire LSD team was at our industry’s annual conference (continuing education - YAY) with limited work availability.

We immediately contacted the customer and they were very understanding that this was a shipping issue and out of our control. They asked us if they should go on Amazon and order blank speakers to hand out, but we told them we would take care of it. As a promotional products expert, we know that having their branding on their giveaways was very important! Within the hour, we had three alternative speaker options for the customer that could be produced and shipped the same day. They picked their favorite and received the speakers just in time- and even said they liked their alternative option better!

THE CLIENT: A MIDSIZE BUSINESS

THE F-UP (STORY):

Because our customer service is second to none, from time to time, we run into a customer who takes advantage of us always going the extra mile.

We had one customer that we noticed a pattern emerging: no matter what the order was, they always brought an issue to us upon receiving it. For example, they received a lanyard order where the imprint was visible on both sides (think the reverse image on the back). Even though they approved an artwork proof beforehand that accurately reflected their finished product, we issued them a full-credit for the order since they were unhappy. Another time, they ordered sunglasses and told us the imprint was fading, but they had already handed them out and could not return them to us, so we also credited them for that order.

The final issue was they told us that their custom t-shirt order was short in quantity. When we asked what was missing, they said they were missing 11 smalls. We did some investigating and discovered that they had only ordered 2 smalls (which were delivered). When we explained to the customer that we provided them with the exact number of shirts they ordered, they still disagreed despite the proof being in their approved sales order.

THE LSD FIX:

Ultimately, we decided to reprint the “missing” shirts at our cost so they had them for their clients, but our work with them had come to an end.

We hate to do this, but we did a postmortem, and over the last year of working with them, they received more than $25K in products and effectively paid $0. Ouch!

THE CLIENT: A NATIONAL YOUTH GROUP

THE F-UP (STORY):

We have a customer that orders duffel bags for their youth group’s trip every summer. These bags get “split shipped” to four locations. One year, they placed their reorder and signed their sales order with all the same details as the previous year. The day before their participants were supposed to get the bags and leave for a cross-country program, they contacted us that the 150 bags for the Seattle location had not yet arrived. On our end, it looked like the bags had been delivered two weeks prior, so we were confused to say the least. The customer then realized that the colleague who lived in Seattle last year had moved, and they forgot to notify us of the address change.

THE LSD FIX:

The only way to get the client their bags that day would be to contact the new tenant of the Seattle address. After some internet-detective-work, we found the number for the real estate agent on the property listing. The agent could not give us the contact information for the new tenant, but was willing to call them himself and explain the situation. As it turns out, the new owners still had the boxes of duffel bags and were happy to cooperate with us so we could retrieve them. Since we don’t have any employees in Seattle, we had to hire a private courier to pick up the boxes from the old address and deliver them to our customer. Our client was thrilled we were able to rectify the situation!

As a thank you to the real estate agent and the homeowner, we sent them a gift card for Starbucks. What happened next? The real estate agent asked us if we could help him with his swag! Nice win for everyone!!!

THE CLIENT: A LUXURY REAL ESTATE COMPANY

THE F-UP (STORY):

We were working with a new client who had previously used someone else for their swag needs. Their old swag provider had too many problems and not enough fixes for them. As we always say, it’s not about the mistakes (things happen all the time- as you can see on this page), but it is about how you fix those mistakes.

Once we built the relationship further, they showed us embroidered hats that their previous swag partner had done for them. There’s no sugar-coating this: they looked terrible. The hats were not usable for this luxury brand (B.T.W - not being luxury does not mean you should not “protect your brand” from bad swag!)

They asked us if we could fix them.

THE LSD FIX:

Absolutely! We had to recreate the original embroidery artwork from scratch and were able to salvage the hats for the client! Needless to say, they don’t use that old supplier anymore.

THE CLIENT: AN AMATEUR INTERNATIONAL SPORTS TEAM

THE F-UP (STORY):

Uniforms can be tricky. Names, numbers, and sizing all need to match for each individual. Even when that goes right, what happens when you wash the jersey and the red names and numbers bleed and make your nice white jersey PINK?

Well, that happened to one of our customers the day before they were scheduled to leave for an international competition the following week.

THE LSD FIX:

We had the customer overnight-ship the garments back to us (at our expense). Our decorator was able to do a special wash (3 times) and soak them overnight. We then overnight-shipped the jerseys back to the customer in their original white color just in time for their competition!

THE CLIENT: ANOTHER SUMMER CAMP (I SWEAR CAMPS DON’T HAVE ALL THE PROBLEMS)

THE F-UP (STORY):

This customer ordered an amazingly-cool product called a QuickFlip. It is both a sweatshirt and drawstring bag. You may have seen them on SharkTank!

Unfortunately, there were not enough adult smalls available when they ordered, but they wanted to wait for stock. Two months later, the adult smalls were still out of stock and the client wanted to move forward without them.

They asked us to swap the adult small sizes for youth XL sizes. This is usually an easy swap, but since the imprint area was slightly smaller, the youth XLs would need a slightly different logo. We thought it was clear that those adult smalls would be printed with the youth-size imprint. They thought it was clear that we were going to print them all with the same youth-size imprint.

THE LSD FIX:

When the garments arrived 1500 adult sweatshirts had the adult imprint, but they were disappointed that it did not match the youth imprint. We all went back to the communications we had and it was clear it was absolutely a miscommunication (Three’s Company style). Everyone was right but everyone was wrong.

Because the client did not get what they wanted we reprinted the 1500 sweatshirts at our cost for them no questions asked!