If you follow JTT, you know that I regularly highlight patches from around the industry as part of our Patch Collecting feature. This one is going to be a little bit different because I am going to highlight both a patch and a tremendous customer service experience that I had. I’ll start with the customer service experience.
I recently purchased a Velocity System Light Weight Plate Carrier (LWPC) from Appalachian Training. One of the key features of the LWPC for me is the ability to keep it completely slick but still tuck away a few AR-15 magazines in the elastic magazine pouches that are sewn into the interior face of the cummerbund. However, when I received the PC I noticed the two elastic mag pouches were sewn unevenly so that the two slots closest to the center line of the wearer (the two most useful pouches) were undersized and could not fit magazines easily.
The Velocity Systems LWPC’s cummerbund features integral magazine pouches. This is a stock picture from Appalachian Training – not a picture of the cummerbund mentioned above.
I contacted Appalachian Training and Mike, the owner, immediately returned my emails as usual. He didn’t have a replacement on hand but he confirmed that his personal cummerbund was sewn the same way. So I contacted Velocity Systems using the email address that I found on their Facebook page. That email was responded to in less than 5 minutes and the experience only became more impressive from there.
I was corresponding with Pat Quinn, a VP at Velocity Systems. This is when something that I have never seen happened. Pat acknowledged that it sounds like there might be a production issue with that size cummerbund. Not only that, be he tasked someone with looking into the issue and taking care of me. At that point, I was handed off to Russell, a sales coordinator, who quickly and professionally took care of me by dropping a new cummerbund in the mail which I had in hand in about 3 days.
It was very refreshing to see a company 1) actually acknowledge that there may be an issue and 2) delegate the task of addressing at both the production level and with the individual customer. The whole process was personal and seamless.
Now, onto the patches…
Velocity Systems tucked in a couple of their patches with the replacement cummerbund. These patches feature Velocity System’s stylized “V” logo. One is subdued and the other is rendered in full color. I like the full color one because the color scheme reminds me of something you might see on one of those awesome ’70s custom vans.
Check out Velocity Systems at VelSyst.com. Stay tuned for a full review of the LWPC after I put some more time on it.
