In May I bought a £120 pair of Sinuosa shoes from Camper online. After two weeks, one insole broke and I exchanged them in store. After two days, I noticed the left shoe was very tight, causing bruising and swelling to the top of my foot. Even after wearing them for a while this didn’t get better and, after three weeks, I went back to the store. I was told it was a “sizing”, rather than a quality or manufacturing, issue. Yet this was the third pair of this style I have bought – all the same size (38) – and the first with that problem. The shop simply told me to contact customer services.
They asked me for a photo of the shoes – alongside my injured foot – and then asked me to send them the shoes by recorded delivery at my own expense, which I refused.
They finally sent a courier so its “quality department” could check them. After hearing nothing for two weeks, I was advised that the shoes hadn’t arrived.
Eventually, Camper informed me that there was nothing wrong with the shoes and returned them to me. The whole process took over five weeks.
I find it astonishing that Camper boasts about its two-year guarantee and yet refuses to acknowledge a problem. I’m not happy about being sold an expensive pair of shoes which have been manufactured so badly they injure my foot. I’d be happy to exchange the shoes, or at least the left one! MH, London W1
Maybe it’s the weather, but we are getting a lot of complaints about shoes for their failure to be durable, or water-resistant, or waterproof. Camper is a very popular upmarket shoe brand which is Spanish-owned, but with a large international network of sales outlets, including the UK. That makes it all the more surprising that such a large and reputable company returned the shoes to you as they were clearly not “fit for purpose”.
The Sales Of Goods Act sets out that goods must be exactly that – fit for purpose – and these rights are in addition to Camper’s own two-year guarantee which, in your case, didn’t appear to be worth a great deal.
After we contacted the firm’s head office in Madrid, Camper has agreed to exchange the shoes after all. This you did at London’s Regent Street store (your choice) where the staff were very helpful and had been pre-briefed by customer services.
We don’t quite understand why they dragged their heels (ouch) for nearly four months on this and, disappointingly, the company has failed to give us a proper explanation.
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