Hello, everybody! Hope everyone is having a good one. Just coming in to say that Zach and I (as may be obvious) are super active in the headphone community on all of the forums. There are so many! We have unfortunately seen headphones being misrepresented either purposefully or by accident by a user down the line and in the end we have tried to classify our items better for community members.
That said, the stamp is more discreet than it might look here, and is an imprint without any coloring, and is not from our perspective meant to be a moniker of 'damaged goods' or the Scarlet Letter of something being lesser, but a designation of a B-stock set, which means that it is not a run of standard production headphone and may have some uncategorized mark, wood grain, finish we were trialing, etc. We have other stamps that go on headphones as well "Demo" for units bought off the table at CanJam "Review Unit" when sent to reviewers, etc. They all are a small branding under the model brand. I am the first one to throw a veto at anything I think looks ugly, but IMHO, the brand is pretty small and not at all a billboard or advertisement of "lesser than." There are a lot of headphones that are out in the world with these small brandings that haven't been thought about or spoken about until now, including the b-stock brand which we've had for some time but not always used consistently until the used market, and our reputation got more out of hand. We have been using these stamps for over a year. I think when looking at a headphone in hand if you don't think to look at the brand with intention, you don't really see or think about it. Again, this is from my perspective of being someone at the company who is on the aesthetics side.
We have always been really proud of ZMF November and our B-stock sale, and do note that the rarity and over-run headphones that are not labeled as b-stock at checkout will not have a b-stock marking. In the future given the feedback by a few of you we will look into other ways, but we sat down as a team and re-discussed this, and came to the same conclusion, those changing out the b-stock band will most likely do so because they want to keep the headphone for a longer period of time and be honest about it, those who are trying to gain a small amount of financial gain will likely not want to go through the cost, time or effort of changing out the band. Of course there will be outliers but that's what we've found, and I think you can also see that there's been less negative reddit posts about ZMF lately, which does lead to Zach and I spending an immeasurable amount of time trying to sort this out. We were of the perspective that having (small/discrete) clarity around standard production vs. non-standard protects ZMFs reputation as a brand which translates to security of your headphone investment to our owners.
So anyways - we will look into a new way to do this in the future, but we figured this method which we've been doing for a while was better than not having a b-stock sale at all as we are a tiny business and need to put our energy towards production and not clean-ups, and I wholeheartedly think most will not mind and appreciate the awesome b-stock headphone that lands at their door.
Off to get some headphones out the door! We are busting hard over here, but please shoot us an email at
support@zmfheadphones.com if you need anything or have any questions.
. The kids will have to suffer the earcups on either side of me if I decide to listen.
