Zipperless, Cold, and Sad in the Balkans

Ok, maybe not so sad. But that was the subject line of an email I sent to Mountain Hardwear's Warranty division ("lifetime warranty!") when I told them how I now have not one but two broken jackets with non-functional zippers. What follows is a portion of the letter I wrote to their warranty division. At any rate, I thought you'd enjoy these photos. I posted them on Facebook as well, but maybe the wider world would like to appreciate the suckiness of Mountain Hardwear's zippers. Hopefully I'll soon be able to add a comment to this post about how awesome their customer service is, although so far all I've gotten is an auto-reply that their warranty division was short-staffed and not accepting emails right now.

Dear Mountain Hardwear,


I have been a loyal customer of yours for over ten years, and have convinced many of my friends that your products were worth the extra money due to their quality design and durability. Last summer I moved from Bozeman, Montana to Sofia, Bulgaria (I miss the Rockies, but the Balkans are interesting) to teach high school biology. It was a big move, and while I couldn’t take very much of my gear with me, most of my Mountain Hardwear items made the cut. I kind of looked like a Mountain Hardwear commercial when I would layer up with my SubZero Vest, Windstopper Tech Jacket, and a mountaineering shell you don’t make anymore. (I could have added my SubZero parka, but that would have been overkill!) A colleague of mine moved here from California and bought a whole line of new North Face attire to keep him warm, so of course I teased him about how he had chosen the inferior brand. That teasing didn’t last long.

Me, in happier times, in my fleece jacket. Oh, how I miss you, zipper.

Walking home from the grocery store one chilly October night, my jacket zipper got stuck. Not a big deal, except that it would not pull free. Even after I got home, I was trapped in my coat. You can see the ridiculous pictures below of my attempts to escape. My wife had to cut the zipper head off with pliers to free me! Had this happened on one of my more adventurous outings in the mountains, it could have been a real problem. As it was, now the only fleece I brought to Europe was broken, and backed by a lifetime guarantee that required spending big money for international postage. Worse than that, winter was on its way, and I didn’t want to wait several months for the jacket to make a round trip to the USA via mail. Frustrated, I decided to suck it up and try to muddle through until summer when I would return to the US for a few weeks.

Stuck in my Windstopper Tech Jacket. The pit zips came in handy for attempts at freedom, but ultimately, not handy enough.

Unsuccessfully trying to force the jacket over my giant head. I can't blame the jacket for my apparent mushroom head. As I couldn't really go to school like this, the only option left was to attack the jacket with pliers.

And then another zipper broke, on a different Mountain Hardwear jacket! This time it was my mountaineering shell. What are the odds of that? I was out skiing this time, but luckily it was a sunny day and I was close to home. If I had been in the backcountry or on a week-long trip, I would have been much more upset. My friend with the North Face gear is really starting to give me the hard time now -- at least all of his zippers work!

Check out the cool broken zipper. I now leave it half-way up to keep warm (the Velcro closures also don’t stay closed at all), making my nice mountaineering jacket a rather awkward pullover.

Showing off my two broken jackets next to a lovely map of Bulgaria.

I would try to take the jackets to a local tailor to try to repair the zippers, but they are technical jackets with expensive parts. There is a windstopper liner on one and gore-tex on the other, and I didn’t want them damaged any more than necessary.

So now it’s mid-winter in Bulgaria, and I’m now down two jackets due to zipper failure. If only I had some extreme story to explain how I broke my zippers…sadly I do not. I would like to go skiing, but I no longer have any reasonable gear to do so that doesn’t require safety pins to keep even a little of the snow and wind out. This is not really acceptable. I would like to continue to be a loyal Mountain Hardwear customer, so I hope your lifetime warranty will come to the rescue. Even though the jackets are in terrible shape right now, they still are all I’ve got, so I don’t really want to mail them away for months. Do you have any possible suggestions? Does your European office deal with issues like this (as I am living in Bulgaria), or should this go through the USA office (where I bought the items)?

Thank you in advance for any help you can offer.

Feel free to hang these photos around the office – I’m sure they’ll brighten someone’s day. I don’t really know how my head got to look like such a mushroom while trapped in your jacket, but that is indeed how it looked.

Sincerely (and coldly)

Jeff