Pounds Photographic Lab

As a professional fine art photographer, my partnership with a reliable photo lab is essential to the integrity and reputation of my business. I need reliable, high quality work delivered to the highest professional standards. Pounds has proven, again and again over my 15+ year relationship with them, that they are simply not up to the task. They have dropped the ball on me over and over, delivering a series of metal prints which are supposed to be ‘ready to hang’ that have literally fallen off with wall with more than 70% failure rate. Many of them have fallen within a matter of minutes after being hung. Others have fallen in the midst of month-​long gallery shows which has been utterly humiliating on both personal and professional levels. How can I be taken seriously as a fine art photographer with such shoddy work that literally won’t stay on the walls? And how could I even think to pass on such shoddy work to my clients? ‘Shit rolls downhill’ as we say here in Texas. No one operating under good faith would pass such a piece to their clients. And yet, pounds has done it again and again over many years. And they continue to treat their long-​term, loyal clients with their high quality BS customer service while producing pile after pile of shit for their clients to deal with as it rolls on down the hill to their respective clients. What does this say about the people working at pounds?
After several years of sticking with pounds despite such massive problems that have compromised my personal and professional reputation at galleries and amongst clients, I’ve come to realize that the customer service which kept me with them for so long is nothing more than lip service to cover up for their shoddy work. They have done absolutely nothing to fix the technical problem with the metal print float mount and hanging bracket system which was failing at remarkable rates. They have reprinted my work numerous times, and each time the prints fall off the wall even faster than the prints they were intended to replace. I’ve even tried to help them fix the problem by experimenting with solutions and found a heavy duty mirror adhesive that works with 100% success rate. I informed pounds of my solution, but did they use it or something similar in their own production? No!!! Why not??? I can only guess that the cost benefit analysis didn’t work out, and that it’s easier and cheaper for them to continue producing prints that fail than to produce prints their clients can rely on. This speaks not just to technical incompetence in the lab but to something far more grievous, namely a lack of personal and professional integrity.
Pounds has caused me to lose clients, clients to whom I had to reimburse thousands of dollars in sales, they have compromised my reputation with galleries, and most recently they have caused me to miss hanging work in the biggest gallery show I do every year due to their incompetence and lack of integrity. I have now decided to end my 15+ year relationship with pounds simply because they cannot be trusted to produce work up to a professional standard. They can’t even be trusted to produce work up to a mediocre standard! The only thing I’d recommend using them for is proofing because they’re fast and cheap, and messing up proofs would hardly jeopardize a person’s career. Any professional quality work, send elsewhere. Don’t be hypnotized by their so called ‘customer service’. After many years going back and forth with them and being sucked back in when my gut was telling me to jump ship, it is crystal clear that nothing has changed at pounds except now I can see them clearly for what they are. You’ve been warned.
EDIT: Since my initial review, Pounds has reimbursed my past metal print orders as I requested after the repeated failures in the hanging brackets. I feel this is as satisfactory a resolution as is possible given the circumstances. Even so, I have decided to close my account at Pounds and am currently looking for another lab to send my work to.