Fjern
A couple of years ago I was hunting around for a raincoat.
I wanted something better than a Peter Storm, but didn’t want to pay the £250 to £300 for the best coats around. I’d long admired the apparel that I’d seen others wear on our Norwegian Coastal Voyages, Iceland and in Longyearbyen.
I wanted the same as them;
Material specifications that demonstrated that the raincoat was good
An authentic outdoor colour - dark colour and bright zips with colour co-ordinated strings - just incase you forget where the zips are, or when wearing gloves can’t get a good grip of the fiddly zips
Water resistant whilst allowing my body to breath when wrapped up - I didn’t want to feel like a chicken being cooked in a bag
To look the part of a well protected dry and warm thoughtful walker
Not to keep calling it a rain coat and to get up to speed with the lingo
But I didn’t want to pay the price that went with it.
Let’s be clear - this was for my 5 km walk around the local area - I wasn’t about to go trail walking.
After a bit of a search I found the match - Fjern
The website, materials, style, zips all passed the initial sniff test. It was clearly a Nordic name built for tough environments - so what was there to double check, and better still there was a sale meaning the £300+ jacket was only £130. Result.
And it more than did the job on my 5km local walks. I felt like a Nordic Explorer in my raincoat Waterproof Shell Jacket. I walked around our postal code in the mild winter conditions no longer afraid of a bit of rain.
21 months passed by….. and I found myself in Iceland. It was summer - but none-the-less the conditions were challenging and the waterproof shell jacket performed very well.
It was then I noticed a developing issue - the pocket seam was separating away from the main jacket - leaving a hole in the pocket.
I then decided to drop an email to Fjern as this felt like a product fault as opposed to wear and tear - asking initially about advice on how to repair. After all, those Nordic brands are great at taking care of their customers.
What I received back after a few emails, surprised me.
The contact details for a repair shop - no thanks
The offer of a £13 credit - no thanks
A swap to the same product - no thanks (same manufacturing issue)
A full refund - Result
During the various emails I became aware that Fjern weren’t what I thought they were. They weren’t Nordic. They were UK designed and manufactured in China, and mostly sold through the SportsPursuit website - https://www.sportpursuit.com which appeared to have more sales than DFS.
After I took the refund I bough the later ORKAN 2 model - https://www.sportpursuit.com/catalog/product/view/id/4263463/. Again for what appears to be a good price - but you really need to ignore the before price as I’ve never actually seen it being sold for anything near to that.
The seam around the pocket has been redesigned, but unfortunately so has the stiff hood front - which was a feature that I really liked.
So what have a learnt;
Some bargains are too good to be believed
Read around brands - don’t stop once you’ve found what sounds like an authentic name
Smart marketing doesn’t directly translate into poor products and poor service.
All in all - I still love the raincoat, and would buy from sportpursuit.com again.
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