Anyone who has received a helmet from Merit Apparel can agree that its customer service and attention to detail well exceeded their expectations. For the past 30 years, Merit Apparel has built its reputation on providing exceptional customer service to customers all over the world.
The company prides itself on creating “happy heads” by going above and beyond in any way possible, and building relationships with its customers.
For starters, owner Rob Hamers spends most of his days on the phone with customers, getting to know their line of work and the types of aircraft they will be flying, in order to determine the types of components they may need.
“Believe it or not, people really don’t know what they need in their helmets,” said Hamers. “Based on the job they are doing, they really don’t have a good idea what’s available for certain types of work that they’re doing, so they sometimes don’t know the right questions to ask, which is why we take the extra time to go through and ask a lot of questions.”
Merit Apparel has been distributing MSA Gallet Flight Helmets for over 18 years and continues to be Gallet’s oldest and largest distributor. They have approximately 23,000 MSA helmets in the field, ranging in price from $1,800 to $3,300.
MSA Gallet offers a wide variety of pad settings to tweak the fit of a helmet for each individual, which in return, helps Merit Apparel stand out from other companies.
“When we fit a customer wearing night vision goggles (NVGs), fit and comfort are critical to minimizing fatigue,” said Hamers.
Merit Apparel began creating custom pads a few years back, after realizing standard pads cannot fit every head the way they should.
“Right now, we’re running at about 92 percent of the helmets we ship out the door fit out [of] the box, which if you talk to people in the industry, today, that’s pretty unheard of,” said Hamers. “People will rarely get a helmet that fits out of the box.”
With every helmet sent out, Merit Apparel provides extra pads, along with Hamers’ contact information. That way, if the customer has any tweaking to do on the helmet, Hamers will pull up their file and instruct them how to change those pads over the phone.
“Nobody does this in the industry. People basically send out the pad system and say, ‘You’ve got all the pads–make it work.'”
The fact that Merit Apparel is the only Gallet-certified location in the world that can do everything and anything to the helmet, allows them to be able to have a helmet sent out within 48 hours–depending on the size of the order–compared to seven or eight weeks elsewhere.
A large stock of helmets and components are kept on hand, so that when people have a need or a problem, Merit Apparel can respond quickly.
“A lot of my customers are referrals from other customers, and that to me is the most important thing,” said Hamers. “We strive to maintain our reputation.”
904-770-7154
If you would like to see your company featured in Insight, contact sales director Frank Sargeant at frank@mhmpub.com.
