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| - UPDATE: Love Your Leather honoured their Money Back Guarantee in my case and offered an additional credit to make me happy. I upgraded from 2 to 3 stars.
Original Review:
I really wanted to have a great experience with LYL, but I just didn't. If I could only rate the staff, I'd give most of them a 4 or 5/5 because they are courteous, earnest, and polite customer-service oriented people from the owner, to the receptionists, to the driver, to the customer-service manager. HOWEVER, LYL's **actual ability** to do leather restoration, in my experience, is 0/5, and this made no sense to me. Maybe these people need to be in a different business.
How can a national, long-time business execute THIS poorly? Several senior staff of LYL have told me that they regularly do "museum restoration" projects. I'd imagine this to mean expert, gentle, highly-skilled, tasteful, and technically competent choices in what they do. None of this was true with the way they handled my handbag.
I paid $200 to restore a vintage Mulberry purse with a water stain and curling flap, and 5 MONTHS later ended up with a differently (arguably worse) damaged, cheap-looking version of my lovely oak saddle-leather purse. After the "restoration", it had a weird off-colour, mysteriously rubbery spray all over (probably to cover the water stain), and unevenly sprayed, even obscuring the cream-colour stitching (which had been an important design feature), and new HOLES due to having allowed the bag to collapse on itself in the drying process, especially at its stress points. I was appalled. My bag was dead.
Over the 5 months, I had asked for a refund, citing their Money Back Guarantee, but they insisted that they would fix it, instead, and I let them try. Attempts by LYL to reverse the damage included filling in the holes, BUT NOTHING could remove the weird rubbery spray-tan that still obscures the cream coloured stitching that the bag once had. The leather is irreversibly dried and cracked all over, where it never used to be. It has most definitely lost any high-end quality it ever had.
There was reasonably prompt, and courteous communication back and forth throughout my experience with LYL. And I appreciated their effort to try to correct the situation. But, why they even own this weird, cheapening, off-colour spray as a tool, or how they can even allow for such dryness to occur in a leather product (whether through their chemicals, lack of conditioning, the way they hang it, or the "junior technician" they allow to handle it etc) makes me think that they are not restorers of high-end items...or leather. I hope this review helps them change their practices; maybe stick to the items they know they can do well; say NO once in awhile to things like trying to restore aesthetically sensitive handbags, which their process cannot do justice to, to meet their own standards.
My last communication with them was to see what to do about my situation, which I think is a worse position than when I started because I did not receive a restored, but a differently, and now non-reparable, damaged bag. I hope to be able to update.
Before I decided to go with LYL, my usual go-to repair place said that there was little to be done for my handbag, and they did not want to take my money. They had even taught me some simple tricks to uncurl the front flap. But I had wanted more for my beloved purse. I should have listened.
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