Rant About Bestop!

Man do I have a rant! The Jeep accessory web site that I do work for (on their web pages) just told me that I needed to change a product page A.S.A.P. Why? Well, it seems that the less than ideal current management team at Bestop decided to stop making its complete line of Pavement Ends Hard Tops for Jeep Wranglers apparently without sending out notices to everyone!!

The company found out about it when a customer placed an order and they were in turn ordering the hard top from Bestop, all of the Bestop hard tops are shipped from the factory. Well Bestop calls them and the conversation goes something like this:

Bestop Rep- "Hey, we don't make that top anymore?" Company Rep-"What Pavement Ends hard tops do you make for the Wrangler?" Bestop Rep - "None". Company Rep - "Why didn't we receive any type of notification?" Bestop Rep - "Duh,... I don't know". Company Rep -"#$%&@$&#, rotten b-----ds!"

It be one thing if this were a rare occurence, but they just did the same d-mn thing this spring! They eliminated quite a few components and only sent out notices on about half of them. I had to scramble to keep up with it. They still listed a number of them on their web site as active and valid parts too! When they were asked about it, we got the same ridiculous response! And, our company sells a lot of Bestop's products. This is no way to conduct business and its from a company that was well run at one time. It's really got me wondering what's going on.

So I started asking questions. The rumor throughout the industry is that Bestop may be going through some financial troubles. They reportedly are not hosting their famous and awesome party in Las Vegas at the SEMA show this year, they've changed how they are going to handle warrantee issues as well, (one more company apparently joins the "lack of service" suppliers), they're eliminating the production of quite a few components, and there are supposedly more changes coming. It does sound like their is trouble at Bestop, and that is really amazing as they own (control it without any serious competitors) a good portion of their industry. If they can't make it go in the bizz, who can?

Financial problems might explain their less than stellar performance of late on their Sound Bars, and now what is happening with their discontinuations. Bestop recently changed manufacturers of the SoundBars and many of them are showing up damaged at the customers home. The rumor is that the new company does a terrible job on packaging the sound bars and they become damaged during shipment. The customer opens the box and he's got damaged goods. Bestop was readily taking care of the problem by shipping out a replacement right away and issuing a call tag to pick up the damaged one. But, I've been told that Bestop is going to stop issuing call tags altogether. How the damaged product is going to be returned and at whose cost is a great question. Looks like it will fall on the retailers and that is really going to tick off a bunch of people when they start seeing it.

I'm really interested to see what else happens with this well-known and reputable company. I cannot see them making these types of changes willingly unless they felt they were absolutely necessary. I'll keep you posted if I learn anything new.