For Christmas my in-law got me a new fly tying vice (The danville from orvis) and after little use (approx. 2 months) the jaws on it went bad. So I sent it back to Orvis and they replaced it for me. Then about 2 months later, and again after little use the same thing happened with the replacement vice. Well I gave Orvis a call and asked them if this time I could just upgrade to a Renzetti travel vice, and they said yes I would just have to cover the difference in price. No problem I just want a vice that works. And the cool thing about this was that the Renzetti was on sale for $150. So today I get a call from Orvis and they tell me they are all out of the Renzetti travel vices... they checked the warehouse and they contacted local retailers... nothing. But they offer me the 2008 Renzetti travel vice, but said it would be $179. I told them to give me a second as I thought about it... as I was thinking about it they then told me they could give me 20% off... this means the new 2008 would be cheaper than the other Renzetti I had ordered by about $5! Well I jump on it.
Anyways I usually try and deal only with local fly shops, but when it came to Christmas and family in Washington was asking what I wanted I figured Orvis was "local" ... well the local big company... Every time I have dealed with them they have been fantastic! I just wanted to give them a little plug here, becasue there people have really made what could have been a miserable process, very easy. Never once did they complain about me exchanging vices... granted it was equiptment malfunction, but I swear sometime with some people it does not matter... every time they told me... "if your not satisified with the quality of the product we want to make it right." I hate it say it but it was not what I expected from a large company. So that's my plug for Orvis, wonderful people, very helpful.
Happy to hear it worked out for you! I'm sure there are others with similar experience for different shops or manufacturesr, probably a few with bad experiences as well. My experience has been the same, I can say I've been very pleased with the Orvis shop in San Jose (used to be Palo Alto), I brought in 2 broken Orvis rods over the last couple of years. Each time the response was pretty much "where would you like your new rod shipped to?" no questions asked. One rod was guillotined in a car window, the other broke on a fish but was probably related to a hard fall I took the day before that broke a finger on the hand that was holding the rod (another Pitt River casualty for the records). Didn't matter, though, they just handled it. Come to think of it they took care of a reel problem for me on a different occasion too. Gotta give credit where credit is due. Buy from the good outfits and always carry two rods!
