Thinking in Public
Lululemon lost me as a customer when they moved off the wear-it-and-return-it-whenever policy. It felt like they stopped trusting their own product. They knew a pair of leggings might not survive a year, so they built in a deadline before that could show.
Today lululemon's return window runs 30 days for a refund, and their Quality Promise covers manufacturing defects for the practical life of the product, evaluated case by case, checked September 2026. That's still a real guarantee. It's a smaller one than the one that made me a customer in the first place.
A guarantee is the brand telling you it trusts its own product. Shorten the guarantee and you've told the customer something too. You didn't mean to say it out loud.