Vulpine Clothing

Anyone want one of their medium black henley things? Worn a couple of times in winter, washed on wool setting, £20 posted

Anyone with the inside track of what's going on with Vulpine? They seem to be in a perpetual state of sale at the moment...

Season stock change?

Cant comment on the perpetual sale situation, but they seem to have some distribution and communications problems at the moment.

really not impressed, i bought a couple more polo shirts and the henley t-shirts and this time washed them on the hand wash cycle. all of them have fucking shrunk.

they have not dealt with the other shrunken garment from 2 weeks ago either.

selling off stuff, then relaunching a new stock/season?

(details might be in one of the investor update emails, but can't recall seeing anything too recently)

the main man had to take back control of the wheel, or at least the ship's Bridge, so he's probably refocusing the company after the all too brief stint of the chap who was paid a lot of money to do stuff.. guess some learnings happening on the Vulpine journey too..

I got a third of the way in and got bored. What a huge narcissist.

http://www.vulpine.cc/blog/2016/06/19/happy-anniversary/

Talk about your stuff that relates to your product... not your life story...

They have massive back log, from what I could get out of them, it sounded like they have some major system issues.

If you want them to deal with you more quickly you are best forgetting email or phone and taking the social media route. After not getting any response to emails and waiting for an answer for days, a quick negative post on their social media got me a response in under 10 minutes . Fuck knows what is going on with them, it sounded like their back log was several weeks.

The fact that they had a fully stocked sample sale followed by an 8 week fully stocked online sale screamed FIRE SALE to me, but I may well be wrong. I'm no fan of the brand, but it would be a shame for them to go bust. If I was to speculate, I'd suggest they've tried to grow far too fast with far too much investment money and have overestimated the size of their market.

They've been a bit naughty with two independent bike shops I know of in Edinburgh, selling a whole lot of stock then having an online sale at Vulpine.cc not long afterwards. This was on two separate occasions, a few years apart, so not just a one-off fuck-up. It left one shop - a small business who can make good margins on clothing rather than bike builds/repairs - with a whole load of stuff they couldn't shift at full price, or simply hoping .cc would sell out of certain things, resulting in them never stocking it again. The 2nd time was very recently, so you had brand new stock on the sales floor that was in some cases 70% more expensive than from Vulpine directly. I like their stuff, am happy to support UK-based indies but it's clear something's up somewhere in the supply chain.

Their customer service is weak. It's been over two weeks since i responded to them asking what replacement garment I'd like for the one that shrunk a couple of sizes, and still nothing received.

Weird, when I contacted them during the sale for an exchange, they told me, the day after, it's best to order a new garment and return the one I had for a refund, instead of sending it back asking for an exchange.
So far they've been quite quick.

Also send the garments back and got refunds today, after less than a week I sent it to them.

Lots of Vulpine and Hoy Vulpine sale items on Sportpursuit, I ordered the roubaix jersey on Monday and before I've had chance to collect from Royal Mail I see it's now £10 cheaper on there :(

Yep, I got a mate who's been waiting ages for an exchange of size. There's definitely problems in vulpine towers if you ask me.

They have...they've never been able to handle sales properly.
I think they run out of stock for that size and maybe are waiting for some returns.

Now that is free to return many buy several sizes and then send back the ones that don't fit.
They need a couple of shops.

made it to the end (!), could deffo be a briefer blog post, but appreciate knowing a founders life story (albeit the unedited version!);

if only we could all 'become our passions' - alas it's surely impossible (!) - except in the days of passionately working the land, when in the fields!!

Their jackets are nice

Bit pricey mind.....

Hi all, just found this and thought I'd reply. As Bashthebox will hopefully back up, from my detailed DM chat with him this Summer and twitter replies, I'll always take the time to explain stuff as best I can, even to The Likes of Him (joke, Seb). if you ever have any problems, hit me up on @aslongasicycle. No BS (I hope).

We've definitely had problems this year and the growing pains had started to show, which makes me sad. We/I took on too much. My fault. So over the last few months I've been simplifying the whole shabang. We weren't terribly good at wholesale, and I love online, so now Vulpine is purely ecommerce on vulpine.cc. Simple means I can put resources back into service, which I love. I used to do it all myself, but with growing so fast, I handed it off. The Summer Sale was way bigger than predicted, and poor Dani couldn't keep up, particularly not with refunds, which it turned out, were taking an age, as our ERP software (bit too specific?) was garbage. So at least now I've changed it.

In the end it took 5 people (there are 7 staff), including me, instead of 1 (Dani), to reply to all the service emails and do all the refunds (more sales = more refunds). The usual fast week-long turn around became weeks. I hated it. I've always wanted perfect service, and I was staring at very annoyed people on our email inbox, trying to do our best to help. I totally sympathised. Victims of our own success, though we learnt a huge amount. It may not count for much, but our heart was in the right place, but our systems weren't. Now changed.

Umm, not sure if I answered everything, but the blog on 2015 was written because loads of friends, colleagues and customers asked. I guess because, like many of you, I grew up dreaming of cycling, and then I did (rather too simplistically) Become My Passion with Vulpine, they/I thought it would be interesting. There are many customers who are fascinated by the life I've created, which I find a bit embarrassing (but not enough to stop me writing about it, ahem). To be honest its nice to write down, because its so mental being in the middle of it, you don't really take it in.
Anyway, do ask anything you like. Even my PIN number.
Nick.

Nick

Why doesn't your merino wash well? Garments from other manufacturers like icebreaker or Rapha survive my washing machine, vulpine ones just keep shrinking badly for me.

SOCK50 ?

Hi, I'm still machine washing my test merinos from 2010, 2 years before we launched. I always do. But that's not to say you have t had a problem. Are you using bio liquid? Defo cold wash? Is it possible someone is putting on a radiator? It happens.
Email us on info@vulpine.cc and we can sort it, or have you already?
We've used a new merino for this season. It's a Merino State Extrafine. Expensive but insane comfort and quality. Sorry, getting carried away. Give us a shout.

Muh?

It's probably some weird audax thing, wouldn't worry about it.

Any chance of some 3/4 shorts next year? Would be good to have another option other than Swrve's (which were better five years ago) or that other brand which are nice but a bit pricey.

I'll put it into the design super computer. A few people have asked in the past.