Andrew G.

We bought 2 Mountain Warehouse backpacks for a weeklong hut to hut hiking trip in Italy last summer. Mine was fine, but my daughter's had a metal strip in the lower back that was for some reason exposed. The edge of it dug into her back, bruising it and making wearing it painful, which was a problem since we were wearing them 6-7 hours a day. After Day 2, we stayed at a hut that had cell service so I called MW hoping that they might have some fix. They assured me that they would get their engineers on it right away and send me an email with suggestions. I never received anything. She endured the rest of the trio, but this defective design had a major negative effect on her experience. I followed up with MW when I got back, but basically got nowhere. So I spoke to a lawyer friend who suggested we could win in small claims court and get paid back some of the my daughter's portion of cost of the trip. I wrote a letter to MW's CEO and top lawyer explaining the situation. All of a sudden I got lots of service. "We're so sorry! We want to do whatever we can to help. Please send us the backpack so we can look at it." My lawyer said not to send it, as we would then have no evidence, but I trusted that with the CEO now involved that they would do the right thing. So I sent it off to their office in London. To their credit, they did pay me back the shipping cost. But then for the next month they claimed that they had not yet received it, that it was stuck in Customs at the airport. I got in touch with USPS who tracked it and showed it had been delivered a month earlier. After another few weeks, I finally received their verdict. Nothing wrong apparently. Really? So the design has an exposed metal edge that can dig into your back? They did refund the cost of the backpack, $58, but they did not take responsibility for the pain caused by their design. I guess my lawyer was right. And I guess you get what you pay for. I would say it would be better to spend a little more and get a better product and almost certainly better customer service.