Lacoste Customer Experience: How to Anger Customers

I am a fiercely loyal customer. There is little I enjoy more than being able to share experiences—both good and bad— and to dissect what components make up my reaction and feelings. But this is an experience of numerous failures from multiple divisions of one company that has left me saying, “I will never buy another product from Lacoste as long as I live.”

This story starts in May of 2004, when I received a gift of four Lacoste shirts. The colors were not to my taste, and I figured, “No worries. There are thousands of retailers, as well as retail and outlet Lacoste stores. This is a great gift; I just need to swap out the colors for ones I prefer.”

Less than a month later, in June of 2004, I visited the Lacoste store in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Once there, I was told by a snooty employee that the shirts I had were “definitely last season’s colors” and that there was no way to return them to the store. Based on the fact they always seem to have a rainbow of colors (and always have), I had no idea how something was an old color, especially at $72 a shirt.

Failing at the retail store, I figured that the corporate office would stand behind a luxury shirt that costs very little to make, but represents an aspirational lifestyle and a brand that meant soft, breathable, comfortable shirts for years. After a call to them, I received no adequate response, merely the line that since I did not have a receipt, there was nothing that could be done.

From that day on, I have switched to Rugby by Polo and have worn their shirts for the past few years (they are great shirts and have amazingly helpful staff; I highly recommend that you visit their store, if for nothing else than to experience the brand).

In October of 2010, I was cleaning out my closet and came across the same Lacoste shirts. Not wanting to declare them a total loss, I chose to try to recoup some value and put them on eBay. About three days into their seven day auction, I got a note saying that my auction had been ended due to copyright violations. I did a search on eBay and found over 15,000 results for Lacoste and similar auctions, so I was a bit confused. Below is the email from eBay.

My immediate thought was nothing with Lacoste was on eBay anymore. But the search results I found after receiving the email proved that to be a lie.

I sent an email to LacosteUSA, waited seven days and received no response. I emailed eBay and received no response. As the medium, I would normally say eBay should not be blamed, but they stepped over the line by pulling down my auction without any evidence or request for evidence. There was no opportunity to be heard or to provide evidence to the contrary.

At this point in my relationship, there have been three divisions (retail, corporate, and trademark enforcement) that have all failed me and made me never want to deal with the Lacoste brand. Further, eBay has damaged my relationship with them. I have always felt that the economics of eBay was debatable. Now, I’m not likely to use their service, and I have negative feelings toward other divisions such as PayPal.

While the $50 or so that I would have received from the eBay auction would not have changed my life, I would have been less unhappy when I thought about this experience. Instead, I walked away angry, and I’m looking forward to sharing my story as I travel the world discussing touch points and how to optimize them to groups of entrepreneurs throughout the world.

Instead of engaging me in a conversation first, Lacoste chose to remove my listing unilaterally because it allegedly infringed on their IP. I am now happy to damage that same IP by sharing my story and campaigning against them. Funny how that works.

I would appreciate it if you would share similar experience.