Wear and tear repaired at a reasonable cost.
"The rebuilt version of a Land-Rover Defender is much better than the original."
Think of an item of clothing you wear a lot. And love. Nothing precious or overly sentimental. Just a tasteful, well-used staple.
Now say it got damaged.
Would you rather it was repaired or replaced?
When buying clothes, there is one thing that gives me confidence in the vendor. And that is the small sign tucked away in a corner that reads some variation of, “Wear and tear repaired at a reasonable cost.”
This tells me everything that is important.
This tells me that the company expects what I buy to be around for a while. And that the company is interested in a fair relationship with their customers.
It also tells me that the company has the ability to improve what they sell. They have a built-in feedback loop. When they see, for example, that the same seam is giving out, they know what needs to be improved.
And perhaps this point is more saliently made by considering the opposite. How do companies without this feedback know how to improve what they sell? How can there be institutional knowledge in an organization without knowing how customers are faring? (Sales and surveys fall well short.)
So, returning to the original question, what are the use cases when repairing wins versus replacing?
Famously, Elizabeth II wanted her Barbour repaired, not replaced. In some cases—and I learned when talking to the manager of the US Barbour repair facility—owners will pay as much as the cost of a new jacket to keep it wearable.
That is partly because Barbours get broken in. They mold to the shape of the wearer. There is also some evidence that in different locations, waxed jackets develop different colors over time. The patina changes. And even the traditional WASP advice of “tears are fine, stains are not,” breaks down when talking about Barbours. The whisky, gun powder, animal remnants, and so on get subsumed with every new waxing.
