Six Words Zippo Has Paid For Since 1933

"It works or we fix it free." Six words, written by George G. Blaisdell next to the first lighter he made in 1933, in a small town in Pennsylvania, in the middle of the Depression, by a man with no way of knowing whether his company would survive the following winter. Not for a year, not for the first owner, not with the receipt kept. For ever, for anyone.

The company's own history page states, without a trace of hedging, that in more than ninety years no customer has ever paid for the mechanical repair of a Zippo lighter, whatever its age or condition. In 2012, the year of its eightieth anniversary, the five hundred millionth lighter left the factory, carrying the same promise as the first. This is not a slogan. It is an invoice not issued, every day, for nine decades.

The date matters even more than the arithmetic. The promise was written at the founding, before any success. It is easy to promise free repairs with half a billion lighters behind you. It is hard with one small factory and one model, and that is precisely why the promise of 1933 is worth something now. The guarantee was the condition for size long before it looked like a luxury of it.

Then the arithmetic, which any honest accountant would refuse at first sight. Every lighter repaired for free is a small, certain, foreseeable loss, repeated daily for ninety years. Nobody knows how many there have been, and the company does not publish the figure, nor does it need to. Those losses, added up, are the price of the one thing competitors cannot buy from anyone, a promise verified by three generations of people who sent their father's lighter in for repair and got it back without a bill.

The archive of refusals, which has filled so many of these pages, finds its pair here. A brand is built by what it refuses, and it is built just as well by a yes written once and paid every time, with no exception, no "it depends," no complaints department hunting for reasons. The two differ only in direction. The no protects the company from what would spoil it. This kind of yes binds the company to what defines it, and it holds just as well, because both are promises with a price, and the market does not believe promises without one.

Notice, too, how short it is. Six words, no asterisks, no conditions at the bottom of the page, no "while stocks last." Someone hired at Zippo yesterday can apply the promise tomorrow without asking anyone, because there is nothing in it to interpret. Most guarantees in the world are written so as not to be used, and the customer senses it from the first sentence in small print. This one is written to be used, and that is why it is rarely abused, because nobody abuses a thing they respect.

Blaisdell's lighter has equivalents in every trade, the deadline you guarantee, the job you redo when it did not come out right, the answer you give on the day it was promised. Each costs something every time, and each could be written in six words if you dared to pay for them without "it depends."

Look at your guarantee, especially the small print. Which promise of your company is written so clearly that a new employee could pay for it tomorrow without asking you? And how many asterisks does your guarantee carry, and which of them did you add out of fear rather than need? I will ask you for one thing. Squeeze the promise your company pays for every time into six words at most and with no asterisk, because at Zippo those six words have outlasted every advertising budget in the history of lighters.