In January we had a batch of around 600 bodies go out for anodizing and come back the wrong color. Not a little off — clearly more brown-olive than the cooler green we have been selling for years and that buyers match to.
We send anodizing out to a shop a short drive away; we do the machining and assembly here but the type-III hard coat goes to specialists. Dye color in anodizing is finicky. Bath temperature, how long the parts sit, even the metal lot can shift the final shade. This time the dye lot had changed and nobody flagged it.
First thing, I did not ship them. It would have been easy to push them into the wholesale orders and hope nobody compared old and new side by side. But our repeat dealers reorder, and the day a customer lines up an old torch next to a new one and they don't match, you have lost them. Not worth it.
So we split the batch. About 400 bodies were close enough that, on their own, no one would call them wrong — we kept those for a no-logo budget line we sell unbranded, where color match is not promised. The other 200 were too far off, and aluminium can be stripped and re-anodized once, sometimes twice, before the surface gets soft. We sent those back to be stripped and redone against a physical sample chip this time, not a color code.
That is the change that came out of it: we now keep a small anodized chip of our standard green and the shop matches to the actual chip in their hand, not to a number in an email. Numbers drift between screens and dye lots. A physical part does not lie.
Off topic, but the strip-and-redo smells terrible, like a swimming pool that went wrong, and the whole back of the workshop reeked for two days. The guys were not happy with me.
Cost of all this came out of our pocket, not the customer's, because the customer never saw it. That is the right way round. A wrong-color batch caught here is a Tuesday problem; a wrong-color batch caught by a buyer is a relationship problem.
