Schwalbe - great customer service!

I had such a great customer service experience with Schwalbe that I had to share it. My Focus Corrente bike came with Schwalbe tires when I bought it in 2011, and they have been great. Never had a flat! So when it came time to get new tires this spring I wanted to get the same tires. The specific tire I had was hard to find locally (not a super common size - 700x30) so I ended up buying them straight from the Schwalbe website.

I mounted the back tire when I took the bike off the trainer this spring to get outdoors, and was going to mount the front tire when I had time (back tire being more worn because of using it on the trainer).

Rode on the tire about 400 miles in the past couple of months. No problems.

45 miles into a 60 mile ride on the weekend I got off at a trailhead to stretch and have a snack, and I noticed a strange bulge (for lack of a better word for it) on the rear tire. Luckily, there is a bike shop at this trailhead so I took it in there. They said, "whoa! Get that tire off there!" and called it a 'core shift.' I hadn't heard of that before but it definitely looked bad so I took their word for it. Bought a new tire so I could finish my ride and the shop guy marked the old tire where the bulge had been so I could send it in under warranty.

I went to the Schwalbe web site and filled out the warranty paperwork, explaining what had happened and also telling them I have a long organized weekend ride coming up and I'd really like to have new tires by then. I also asked if they would replace the other new, unused tire, because it had the same production code as the flawed tire. I didn't have a photo of the tire on the bike showing the flaw, but the website showed an example of a good photo to send in of a flaw and it was the EXACT same flaw!

Here's the photo -
http://www.schwalbetires.com/company/warranty_policy

The tire looks like it does a little wiggle.

Anyway, I received a response from them the next day saying 'no problem, we'll replace both tires' - wow! The one 'problem' they had, though, was that this tire was discontinued, so would it be ok if they replaced them with a different tire?...the tire they wanted to give me is higher quality and almost twice the price of the ones I had bought! Uh, yeah, that's ok with me!

Didn't even have to send back the flawed tire and/or the unused tire (although I offered to mail them in).

New tires arrived 2 days later, had a great ride on them yesterday.

It seems so rare these days to have such an exceptional customer service experience, I just had to put that out there in case anyone was in the market for new tires. :) Go Schwalbe!

On the other side of the coin...I STILL haven't heard back from Castelli when I emailed them 2 weeks ago with questions about one of their products. Bummer.

Happy weekend riding to you all!
S
ps - anyone know what a 'core shift' means?

Wow that is great customer service. It is so rare these days to even get that kind of service from a LBS. Good to know they stand behind their product. I may consider them for tires now.