Quote:
Originally Posted by exMaggieDrum
Just received the Free Bag that I bought under the IPO deal. I was pretty surprised as to how small it is. About half the size I expected. I am a narrow bodied American so it will work for me OK I think. I have not had a chance to really see how it will work underway. The size thing is a plus/minus as some bean bags are so big they take up too much room. I'll have to see if the small size is a problem over time. If you are a big person I don't think you will like this, or may be even if you are a medium person.
It is very well made and extremely light. I hope the filler lasts a long time for the price I paid. I do like the shape of it. It could be useful as a carry-around chair like in the video if the circumstance comes up.
I did have to pay a foreign transaction fee which I did not expect since I thought I bought it from an American company.
If it works out I might consider buying a second as it can be very handy on passages or even just lounging around the deck. I would be more likely to buy it is it were much cheaper though. My advice is for the company to offer a bigger version at the price of the one I bought and lower the price of the smaller one. But I'm a cheap sailboater.....
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Hi there,
Freebag is a Norwegian company selling directly to customers via the USA based Schooner
Chandlery marketplace. How it works is you're buying from the company directly, but Schooner Chandlery receives a small (3%) marketplace commission on items
sold. It is similar to Etsy, Amazon, Ebay, and other marketplaces.
Most of the Schooner Chandlery sellers are in the USA but right now we do have sellers in
Canada, the UK,
Norway, and
Australia. Customers are world-wide. Items are priced in USA dollars and the charges should be made in USA dollars by the credit card processing company unless you are in the country of the seller (in this case, Norway) at which time, the transaction would take place in your common currency. Please send me a PM about your order (or send a support request to Schooner Chandlery via the site with your order number) and we will look into this a bit more for you.
I'm interest to hear about the "narrow" size/shape issue since I'm one of the more generously endowed American
women.
I have had problems with some other seating not being quite right for that reason, but not the Freebag.
Funny about big vs small -- Freebag actually produced a SMALLER version of the Freebag for the Whitbread/Volvo Ocean
Race about a decade ago. The smaller size was requested by the
race organizers. That product instantly became a success and is now the
Industrial use Freebag that we show on our site but it isn't yet available in the USA. We're getting a test shipment in soon. We're looking forward to offering it here in the USA for boat workers as well as construction workers. If you take a look at the
link here, you can go to the product videos -- see the industrial one -- and see how that one is used as a seat, kneepads, etc. My husband took a look and said he'd love to have one for use crawling around and laying on the ribs/floors of our boat when working on things in/around the
engine compartment.
Regarding the beans lasting and not compressing -- we've chatted with some of the long-term Freebag customers who were very excited to buy new ones -- they state their old Freebags that they've had for many years work like new with the beans not degrading but they were seeing wear on the casing and the Freebags were not looking like new. It seems like the people who had them from the time Freebag
sold them many years ago at a
boat show are the ones who are buying the most in a
single order now. They're often making orders of 4 Freebags each. I took that as a good sign of the quality and performance. One person, buying 4 Freebags to replace their old ones, told us they never did put
cockpit cushions into their
Beneteau because of the Freebags they'd bought years ago.
Price--yes, I'm a penny-pincher myself and it is always hard to spend from the cruising kitty. It sounds like you and I are similar. One of the Freebag customers called in her cc # to me and we chatted about her planned use. She owned a couple Freebags some years ago but had none now and she had replaced her Freebags very recently with a West
Marine cushion that cost $115 ea but started falling apart already. Thus, she just bought two more Freebags with hopes that they will last longer than the other competing product.
FYI, these cushions sell for about 30%-40% more in
Europe than the intro price they sell for here in the USA. To help a friend looking for
replacements for her Freebags, we reached out to Freebag to ask if they'd like to sell via the Schooner Chandlery marketplace. That's when we learned that they had some USA customers who were paying the
Europe price even though there was, of course, a huge
shipping charge,
customs, duty, etc. The company was very happy to be able to offer Freebag in the USA, via Schooner Chandlery, with more affordable fulfillment methods for their USA customers. If you know of other international
marine product companies who need affordable USA-based fulfillment methods, please send them to us--we may be able to help them with USA fulfillment too.
We are glad that the Freebag company is offering a discounted price to customers in the USA at this time but are pretty sure the prices will be going up rather than down. USA consumers right now are actually getting pretty much the equivalent of a wholesale price on the Freebags. I'm not really sure how much longer they'll continue to offer them at the low introductory price since popular but more poorly constructed and less comfortable boat cushions are more costly.
Some people--who already know the product--are
purchasing them for use on
power boats and kayaks so it seems the appeal for these products is broader than just sailboats. At Schooner Chandlery, we're just really happy to be helping another cruiser's (ah, yes, the owner of Freebag IS a cruiser too) business grow.
Fair winds, Brenda