Liquid Screen Design F-UPS
You won't believe the tracking update we got - our container of swag was lost at sea and sitting at the bottom of the ocean! As we always say, “Custom orders come with custom problems”.
But here at Liquid Screen Design, it's never about the hiccups that arise but rather how we creatively solve them for customers. We've fixed plenty of snafus over 13 years, for startups to big brands like Peloton, Lyft, and the Detroit Pistons.
Most companies don’t want to fix mistakes and even hide them, but we're happy to share our solutions to some of our biggest F-Ups.
The point is, when you work with us, you never have to worry. Our team will move mountains to make any situation right through imaginative problem-solving. That dedication alongside our proven track record is what sets us apart. We've got your back, no matter what curveballs come up.
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 that and had the stickers 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 opened the box three days before the race.
THE LSD FIX:
We jumped on this immediately and had the 25K stickers reprinted at our cost with a transparent background and rush-shipped them in order to have them before the race. We also told the organizers to keep the other 25K stickers and use them. Fortunately, the replacement stickers arrived with time to spare.
We now check with our customers on any order that could be transparent for verification!
THE CLIENT: A summer Camp
THE F-UP (STORY):
Our client reached out to us because they accidentally did not order enough shirts for the first day of camp. They were 20 shirts short and camp started in two days. As we were working on ordering the additional 20 shirts and rushing them, they came back to us with a much bigger problem. It turned out that 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 contacted our decorator who said they could handle the rush, got the Hebrew corrected, and ordered the blank shirts to be picked up at will-call from our supplier later that day. We sent a courier to pick up the shirts (about an hour and a half away) and bring them to our decorator.
1000 shirts takes some time (especially when there are a lot of colors that need to dry). Because of the time needed to get the shirts printed, there was only one way to get them to camp by the morning camp started…fly them up to Upstate NY and deliver them ourselves! As our staff got off the plane and exited security with 1000 shirts they met the camp staff and gave them the new shirts!!! Our staff member got on the next flight home.
Not your typical delivery but much faster than UPS or FedEx!
THE CLIENT: Professional Baseball Team
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. The challenge coins were ordered with plenty of time so we were getting them from a great supplier that works with manufacturing overseas. Before the challenge coins arrived we got a pre-production proof of the coin. Low and behold part of the design of 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 professional sports team needed them.
THE LSD FIX:
The LSD team again jumped into action, although in the end, the fix was pretty easy. We found alternative sourcing for the challenge coins but were up against the time to get them remade and sent out in time. We put pressure on our supplier and as soon as the factory came back online we had them all reprinted and overnight shipped from overseas to our client. No time waisted and because our client knew we take care of all the details they knew they didn’t have to worry.
THE CLIENT: A National Non-Profit Organization
THE F-UP (STORY):
At Liquid Screen Design we work with a lot of non-profit organizations. It is great working with non-profits whose missions align with the values of the Liquid Screen Design.
Our customer was having their national convention having delegations of professionals from around North America. They ordered 500 really nice Bluetooth speakers for their delegates that they were planning on handing out at the registration table.
Two days before they were supposed to ship we heard from our vendor that the blank speakers had not arrived yet to be decorated and were not going to arrive in time for the event.
THE LSD FIX:
As soon as we heard from our vendor we contacted our customer (it was a late Thursday and the conference was supposed to start Sunday) to see if there was any leeway. Unfortunately, there was not! In addition the entire LSD team was at our industry’s conference (continuing education - YAY).
Our customer was really understanding that this was a shipping issue and a bit out of our control. They asked us if they should go on Amazon and just order blank speakers to give out. We told them not to worry and that we would provide them with a few options. Within the hour we had three options for the customer that we could print and ship out later that day and get them in time. They picked one and we proofed it and had them shipped out in 24 hours and in the end the speakers were even better than what they had originally ordered.
THE CLIENT: A Midsize business
THE F-UP (STORY):
Because our customer service is second to none, from time to time run into a customer who takes advantage of that service.
We had one customer where this happened over and over again. They would order something and there would be an issue they would bring to us. For example they ordered lanyards, saw and approved the proof but when they got the lanyards the imprint was seen on both sides (think the reverse image on the back). That was on the lanyard proof, but because they were unhappy we gave them a full credit for the order even though they needed to give them out and use them. Another time they ordered sunglasses and told us the imprint was fading, but they gave them out so we could not replace them (they did not need them replaced because they were already given out) so we credited them for that order too.
The final issue was they contacted us telling us that their garment order came and they were missing shirts. When we asked what was missing, they said that they were missing 11 smalls. When we looked back at the order, they actually had only ordered 2 smalls (and those had been delivered).
THE LSD FIX:
When we explained this issue to the customer they disagreed and we provided them with their signed sales order with the correct amount. Ultimately, we decided to reprint the “missing” shirts at our cost so they had them for their clients, but we had to stop working with that client.
We hate to do that, but we did a postmortem and it looked like 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 every year orders duffle bags for their youth group’s summer program trip. These bags get “split shipped” to four locations. One year our client placed their reorder and signed their sales order with their Seattle address from the previous year. Unfortunately, they had moved. The day before their participants were supposed to get the bags and leave for a cross-country summer program they contacted us that the 150 bags in Seattle had not yet arrived. After some research, it looked like the bags had been delivered two weeks prior but to the old address and the person who use to live there actually no longer worked for the organization and had moved to NY almost 9 months before.
THE LSD FIX:
We started looking online to find the new owner’s phone number. Ultimately, we were able to find the listing real estate agent and called him. We explained the issue and while he was not willing to give us the new owner’s phone number he was willing to call them. It turns out the new owners brought in the boxes and just left them inside and were happy for us to get them. Because we don’t have any employees in Seattle we were able to book a courier to pick them up and have picked up and brought over to our client.
Our client was thrilled and as a thank you to the real estate agent and the homeowner we sent them a small 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 been using someone else for their swag needs. Their old swag provider had too many mistakes and not enough fixes for them. 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 a bit further, they came to us with a bunch of embroidered hats that their previous provider made. They looked terrible. Being a luxury brand, they absolutely could not use them. BTW - 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 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 the right person. 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 the garments back to us (at our expense). Our decorator was able to do a special wash (3 times) and soak overnight and they were able to get that out. We then overnighted it back to the customer back to its original white ready for 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. They were on SharkTank! Super fun item.
Unfortunately, there were not enough adult small sweatshirts available when they ordered. They decided to wait until they came back in stock to print them. We decided to order all the ones that were in stock and wait to get the adult smalls. The smalls had still not come back into stock two-months later and the client wanted to move forward.
They asked us to move the adult smalls to youth xl sizes but the youth sized sweatshirts needed a slightly different logo (because of the imprint size space on the smaller items). 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!
THE CLIENT: A regional Real Estate Company
THE F-UP (STORY):
Every year they order 10,000-20,000 plastic footballs to throw out on a Fourth of July parade and at high school football games throughout the year.
This year they decided to order these with plenty of time before the 4th. They placed the order in March which should be plenty of time. Our supplier for footballs is always very communicative but is based overseas so it usually takes 1 business day to hear back if we have a question. Everything was going smoothly but the week they were scheduled to ship we reached out for tracking information and did not hear back. We always proactively ask for tracking so we know and can share it (and identify any issues like we did with this order). Unfortunately, we did not hear back for several weeks so we kept reaching out and hearing nothing.
In the end, we heard in late June that they would be shipping late and arriving July 15th. Obviously, that does not work for a 4th of July parade. Our vendor just could not understand the time constraints and there were absolutely no other companies to get these printed in time. So what did we do?
THE LSD FIX:
The first thing we did was to find blank footballs we could get in time. Let’s just say placing an order for 15,000 footballs from Amazon is not the preferred method. Also, because the Real Estate company is located in an isolated area, we had them shipped to our fulfillment center in Chicago. Then we hired a courier to bring them to the customer by July 2nd.
The footballs we had ordered with their logo was delivered after the parade. We told our customer to keep those footballs as well and we fully refunded them for all the footballs. In the end they received 15,000 blank footballs and 15,000 printed footballs at no cost that they can use next year!
THE CLIENT: An event
THE F-UP (STORY):
The organization we work with had an event and was handing out t-shirts to every person coming to the event and had taken sizes for each person.
Everything went smoothly but when the shipment of garments arrived 11 of 12 boxes were delivered. The 12 box was “delayed in transit” by FedEx. Our customer was reasonably concerned that they would not be there for the event. To make matters worse, this was a Friday evening with the event starting Saturday morning!
We have a dedicated staff member at LSD who works with all the major shipping companies to help fix shipping issues. Unfortunately, FedEx could not give us any details.
THE LSD FIX:
In order to ensure they received the shirts for their event we ordered blank replacement shirts from our supplier, sent a courier to get them, brought them to our decorator (2 hours away), had them printed, and then had the same courier bring them to the customer (6 hours away). They were delivered at 1 AM on Saturday morning! Phew!!!!
THE CLIENT: A Friend’s Bar Mitzvah
THE F-UP (STORY):
There is nearly nothing worse than when an order goes wrong for a wedding or Bar Mitzvah. One thing that is worse is when it is a close friend!
In this instance, a good friend was the customer and it was for their son’s Bar Mitzvah. The long sleeve t-shirts arrived two weeks before the big day, but the Wednesday night before the event one of the parents decided they would wash their shirt so it fit nicer at the party.
When they pulled it out of the wash the imprint faded. We had them try washing another one (just to make sure it wasn’t a one-off issue). Unfortunately for us, all of them had the same issue! Yikes!!!! All the shirts had already been rolled and labeled to be given out.
THE LSD FIX:
Again, we contacted our supplier and got new blank shirts (actually upgraded to a nice sweatshirt because the shirts were now out of stock). We send a courier first thing Thursday morning. Then had our decorator rerun them and had one of our staff go over and roll and label each sweatshirt. We shipped them out Thursday night overnight morning delivery and they arrived Friday by noon!
Our friend and customer was shocked that we could turn that around so quickly for them and the event went off with everything they needed!
