A crack in the corporate reputation

You just can’t be too careful in catering to a fickle marketplace.

No one knows that better—now—than high end curlingwear manufacturer OliverOrange. Once upon a time, it was an analyst’s darling—a company that could seemingly do no wrong. Now, thanks to some concerns about the quality of its product, combined with some injudicious comments by its chairman and founder, the stock is trading at around 50 per cent of the alltime high it reached last year. Competitors are hovering over the company’s carcass, smelling blood.

Ten years ago, no one would have dreamed that recreational gear aimed at one particular sport, namely curling, could succeed at grabbing a high-end niche. But company founder Flip Watson had a vision and pursued it relentlessly. All of a sudden, everyone wanted to wear OliverOrange curling pants, jackets, shirts—even socks. And customers did not seem to mind the price point. They wanted the cachet, and the quality, regardless of the cost. Watson was determined to deliver, and became known as a fanatic over quality control, much to the delight of his loyal clientele.

But success breeds its own problems, and over the last three quarters, OliverOrange has struggled with supply chain issues – so much so that the Canadian Curling Association almost cancelled its exclusive contract with OliverOrange as official supplier to the famous Canadian Brier championships. OliverOrange was caught on the horns of the classic dilemma: deliver the product, and hope that quality would not decline; or hold the product off the shelf, risk incurring the wrath of unfulfilled customers, and miss the profit opportunity. It chose to deliver the product, and almost got away with it. Almost.

“It was when I was sliding to deliver my second rock in the eighth end against the Prince Edward Island team,” said Alberta skip Brent Buttledorfer, “when I felt this cold draft around my lower back. I couldn’t figure out what it was at first. I heard some people behind me laughing from the stands, and I thought, wait a second, I didn’t deliver such a bad shot. But in the next end, the same thing happened to our lead as he delivered his first rock.

“Sure enough, he had felt a draft too, and all of a sudden I knew exactly what it was. The elastic had gone on the waist of my curling pants, and with that also went my dignity, never mind my game.” Curling fans will remember that the plucky PEI team stole three from the highly favoured Albertans in the tenth end to grab the national championship for the first time in 20 years.

Buttledorfer was not one to keep his views to himself, and soon, radio talk shows were lighting up with curlers’ complaints of similar unwarranted exposure of the upper spherical orbs of the gluteus maximus, just as they stretched out to deliver a finely placed rock. And before you could say sweep the house, OliverOrange had a public relations disaster on its hands.

Forgetting the elementary rule of crisis management (hire a crisis manager), Watson plunged into the fray in a rather lame attempt at humour that quickly backfired. “It’s nothing that can’t be seen everyday when you watch a plumber bending down to fix a kitchen faucet,” he was quoted as saying. Not only did curlers consider he was making light of their complaints, the Canadian Brotherhood of Plumbers took to the airwaves with an attack ad that accused Watson and OliverOrange of belittling their members—many of whom, it noted, were curlers themselves.

Instead of backing down and apologizing, Watson then compounded the problem by saying that the curlers who had been complaining about his product had “issues around the midriff,” and that the curling pants were really only designed for curlers “who looked after themselves and kept their waistline below 36 inches.” The effect, of course, was to further alienate a huge swath of customers who were loyal to the product. On top of that, the short sellers got wind of the crisis and the stock price started heading south. The OliverOrange board put out a statement last spring expressing “absolute and total confidence” in Watson—who still owns 62 per cent of the company. Sure enough, three days later, the company issued a further press release announcing that Waton had stepped down to “pursue other exciting opportunities in the field of bikini waxing.” At press time, no replacement had been announced.

Can OliverOrange survive? Many analysts have their doubts. Curlers are notoriously finicky purchasers, noted one, and once alienated might be highly unlikely to give the company a second chance. Nevertheless, the company no doubt has some tricks up its sleeve. Rumours abound that OliverOrange is looking at a major diversification into pokerwear or meditationwear. But others think that would be a stretch.

dsimmonds@wellingtontimes.ca