Therein lie lessons for companies that face similar crises, of which there are a lot. Nokia has announced a recall of 14m phone batteries, while Toyota is still coping with a recall of 3.8m cars with floor mats that can make the vehicles accelerate uncontrollably and crash.
Lesson one: be ready. “Like the Scouts, you must be prepared and Maclaren was not,” says Craig Smith, professor of ethics at Insead, the European business school.
Maclaren had plenty of warning – the 15 incidents of fingertip laceration or amputation in the US occurred over 10 years, but it became concerned when there were eight cases in the past two years. It has been working since the summer on how to remedy the problem.
But when the announcement of the recall (confusingly, “recalls” in the US need not involve products actually being taken back) leaked early, Maclaren was left floundering. Not only did its technology fail, but it was several hours before Bahman Kia, its US chairman, offered to give media interviews.
Reaction to such events tends to move swiftly, especially in the age of the internet. By Tuesday, Maclaren had vans driving around New York handing hinge covers to people with strollers and was urging European executives to talk to the media but it was already playing catch-up.
Lesson two: empathise. Maclaren is the latest of many companies to fall into the trap of being inwardly focused and failing to realise how customers will react. Finger injuries account for 3 per cent of the total to children from using pushchairs and such serious cases are very rare.
But statistics do not reassure consumers when something so horrifying is involved. “Companies tend to approach recalls with an engineering mindset but that is not how most consumers respond. They do not have a good appreciation of risk,” says Prof Smith.
Maclaren knew it had an extremely low accident rate (“zero” according to Mr Rastegar) when children are seated in fully-opened pushchairs, and its folding frames and hinges are stronger than many competitors. The consumer heard “amputation” and that was enough.
This problem of inward focus was exacerbated by the fact that Maclaren is a private company, or set of companies, controlled by Mr Rastegar’s family and is uncomfortable about public scrutiny. It has had a similar shock to other private equity companies that acquire consumer brands.
Lesson three: be polite. The injuries were caused by carers letting children grasp the hinges as they opened pushchairs. Mr Rastegar insists that he is not blaming his customers but at times it sounded a bit like that. “If you operate the product properly, your child is not at risk,” he assured me.
On paper, he is correct but any parent knows how difficult it is to corral a small child while opening a pushchair, often in a hurry and feeling hassled. Maclaren needed to be better prepared with a simple, inoffensive way of pointing out what parents needed to do.
Lesson four: don’t discriminate. Maclaren’s biggest mistake was to appear to be treating American children’s fingertips as more precious than those of children in the UK and other countries