Case study
A heritage association during a product recall
Helping an association of makers founded more than a century ago to recall an entire product line, explain why in its own voice, and report on the recall every month since.
The situation
In November 2024 a heritage association of makers, founded in 1911 and governed by articles its members still sign, reported to its licensing regulator that six units of its newest product line were outside the settings in which they were licensed to operate. Three weeks later, having established that the means by which units were told apart could no longer be relied on, it recalled every unit of the line, more than two thousand in all, and asked the regulator to revoke the line’s licence. The regulator did so the same day.
The association had never recalled anything. It had no communications team, a general counsel who had represented it before the regulator for two decades, and members who regarded the line as the finest thing the house had made.
What we did
We were asked in on the day of the first report, by the general counsel. Our first recommendation was that the association should say less than it wanted to and sooner than it wanted to: a short statement the following morning confirming the report, saying what it did not know, and asking the public not to approach anyone it believed to be a unit.
For the recall itself we worked on one sentence above all others. The association’s members wanted to defend the product; its regulator wanted to hear that the problem was understood. The sentence the association published said both, in its own voice: that the recall was a judgment not on the product, which had met every specification set for it, but on the means by which units were told apart from people.
We then designed the monthly report: one page, published on the last day of every month, giving two figures, the units recovered and the units outstanding, and nothing else unless something else had happened. It has been published on the last day of every month since January 2025.
From the work
The house
stands behinddoes not regard the recall as a judgment on the line, which met every specification set for it and exceeded one.
Units recovered at month end, as reported
Outcome
By the association’s own count, more than ninety-nine per cent of the units have been recovered. It has published its figures on the last day of every month, without a gap, since the recall began, and the monthly report has become the document its regulator, its members and the press all read first.
We continue to advise the general counsel on the recall’s reporting and on the association’s correspondence with its regulator.
They took a great deal out of our first draft and nothing out of what we meant.
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