Jeff Naylor

Disappointing customer service experience

Gray Suede Dress Gloves

My preference for formal dress gloves are gray suede.

Go ahead, try to find them.

I’ve been told in various gentlemen’s forums that Chester Jefferies in Dorset, England was where I needed to go to find precisely what I was looking for. Although gray suede doesn’t appear in their online catalog, they supposedly respond to such queries with near immediacy and that their customer service is unparalleled.

Yeah, well, not so much.

A couple of weeks ago I used the contact page on the Chester Jefferies website to explain that I was looking for a gray sueded glove that doesn’t appear among their standard offerings, and asking if such a thing could be made available.  Will of A Suitable Wardrobe recently had the firm make up a pair of yellow chamois gloves that also do not appear in their catalog, after all.  I thought surely if the company can easily produce a pair of gloves of yellow chamois certainly my substantially more pedestrian request would be no problem.  Or, at the very least, the question would be worthy of a reply.  However, after submitting the question once through their contact form, and then again several days later without so much as the courtesy of a simple response either time, I can only assume that the company either no longer reads its e-mail or that it just doesn’t respond to e-mail from me.  Either way, it appears that Chester Jefferies is not particularly interested in my business.  Fortunately, I’ve sourced my gloves elsewhere, and although not the truly bespoke gloves I was interested in I’m sure they’ll be fine.

It does annoy me though that in this economic environment when I can’t turn on the television without hearing that companies are failing right and left because no one is buying, I’m standing here with cash trying to buy gloves in bloody JULY, and I can’t seem to interest this particular firm in so much as doing me the courtesy of telling me to bugger off.

I mean, I might understand if they were French.