I’m a really loyal customer when companies do what I want — make products I love and treat me well if I buy a lot of them. I have a love-hate relationship with Eddie Bauer. And I suspect, not knowing anything in particular about Eddie Bauer Holdings Inc. (other than that its assets were sold at auction in August for $286M to Golden Gate Capital), that most of my hate comes from the fact that Eddie Bauer doesn’t know how to use technology on behalf of its customers.

I’ve been a loyal customer of Eddie Bauer for at least the last decade. I buy the company’s shirts religiously: The LT size fits my torso perfectly. Eddie Bauer Wrinkle Resistant shirts really do resist wrinkles over a long period and many washings. But they still pass as dress shirts (rather than stiff upgrades from the polyester of yore). So every shirt I currently use for work is an Eddie Bauer. (I even experimented and bought a shirt from Old Navy, but it doesn’t fit right, it gets wrinkled even though it’s not supposed to, and it doesn’t feel like real cloth.) I’ve also more recently started buying Eddie Bauer’s pants too, since they fit and have the same wrinkle-resistant and fabric qualities. (TMI, I know, but I still get my shorts and socks from Nordstrom, which does know how to use technology but doesn’t make my kind of shirts and pants!)

I just went to eddiebauer.com, logged into my account and clicked on my order history: Two orders are recorded, one each from September and October of this year. What kind of order history is that? I’ve got at least 20 shirts hanging in my closet, about half of which I ordered from the web site. (Maybe customer records were not part of the bankruptcy sale to Golden Gate Capital?)

Okay, whatever: Now I want to buy two pairs of pants like the one that I’m wearing way too much because it’s the only pair I have that’s exactly what I want. I look at the labels in the pants. Size. Care. Brand. But no indication of what the model or SKU of the pant is. I go to eddiebauer.com and look at the men’s pants. There are Wrinkle Resistant pants called Dress Performance Kahkis and other pants called Casual Performance Chinos. Do I already own a Kahki or a Chino? I don’t know! The pant doesn’t tell me. The web site doesn’t tell me. So I order blind (which was the October order — I wrong wrong and returned the order, none the wiser).

Okay, I’ll go to the goddamn store, of which there are two in San Francisco, two more in the suburbs, and three outlet stores in those outlet malls in the distant burbs. The fun begins. I don’t have a product name to use with the store staff. (Yeah, I should have brought the pants with me.) I do have something called an Eddie Bauer Friends card, but the irony is that the store staff can’t look up my account to see what I’ve bought either! If I do find a shirt or pant that I like but isn’t in the right size, they can’t look up inventory in another store or online and have it shipped to me.

I could be behind on this, since I haven’t tried actually asking for help in an Eddie Bauer store in the last few months, so maybe they’ve fixed these problems. But I’m a regular visitor to the store at the San Francisco Center store as well as an occasional visitor to the outlet stores in San Rafael, Fairfield and Santa Fe, NM. I even pop into Eddie Bauer stores in malls in other cities, when I see one. The reason I bother going to the stores: I’ve discovered that, in the stores (but not online), I can find unique shirts with great patterns that are sometimes in my size. You have to look at the shelves underneath the main dress-shirt display, but I’ve found this works in every store I’ve stopped into around the country, whether in a mall or in an outlet.

In fact, I’ve turned this into a kind of game: Whack The Shirt. I’ve gotten a few really sweet shirts out of the game. (I just love the black one with slight white pinstripes.) But I’m getting tired of playing the game. Why, I wonder, can’t Eddie Bauer’s inventory system keep track of every shirt they put into it. My favorite wine store, K&L Wines, keeps track of every bottle of wine they have, including which store (four in all) and warehouse (three) each bottle is in and how many are left. They can guarantee delivery of what they are selling.

Eddie Bauer’s systems are so bad that they can’t tell you what you’ve bought, they can’t help you buy more, and they find new ways to frustrate loyal customers! The word about the bankruptcy was that the company couldn’t work out of its heavy debt load. I’d be willing to lay odds that they ended up taking that debt in the first place because their IT department couldn’t build flexible systems that delivered products to customers efficiently and happily! (But whatever you do, Eddie, please don’t go out of business and make me go buy shirts from someone else.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 5:59 pm and is filed under Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.