Mark Golden on Paint

It has happen more times than one would like to admit, but our customers continue to give us gifts in the form of complaints that are an invaluable source for improving our Company, its products and services. From time to time those gifts are fairly loud and packed in a pretty angry box. More often they are given with grace and thoughtfulness, packed with care. Our customers tend to be people who know and respect the values of our Company and give us the benefit of the doubt that we are always trying to ‘do the right thing’.

It is easy to become immediately defensive and to justify or explain away the issues or defects. We work hard to assure our products and services are always of a quality we can be proud of. We work just as hard to provide artists with the information that allow them to be successful when working with our materials. So when a complaint crosses the desk of our customer service or technical service group it is important for all of us to first accept the gift and to take the side of our customer and only after fully understanding the issues, to then try to share a potential solution or a next step.

This week we had two such gifts. One from an artist who has been making our OPEN Acrylics and our new Modern Mixing color set work his magic: Including bringing his own wonderful inventiveness, which he has shared on his website. www.joebergholm.com. He has been precise in his method, which gave us a head start in getting to understand the exact problem and where it exists. From his work and our confirmation he has demonstrated several places in our mixing poster where the mixing formulas do not match the outcome expected. When we investigated…… he was absolutely right. So on the next printing we will be including the corrections and we’ll be making note of it on our website as well.

The second came from an artist who suggested that our Neutral Gray #5 was off center from the Munsell Standard. Sure enough when we investigated we discovered the slight drift and again so thankful for the incredible dedication and sophistication of our customers and their willingness to bring it to our attention.

One can’t help being disappointed when we recieve a customer’s complaint. Yet after this initial disappointment, we get over it and begin the process to create solutions… and when neccessary, to make the changes and to implement new quality assurance measures to see that we avoid the same mistakes in the future. I’d like to say this is foolproof, yet as a Company constantly pushing the envelope and trying new things, what is foolproof is that we have an amazingly talented and thoughtful collection of customers that are willing to share these gifts with an also amazingly talented and dedicated group of employees… that is, if we continue to be smart enough to accept our customer’s gifts.