Seattle-based company offers touching return policy

"He said, 'Please don't ship it back. If you know anybody who could use a winter coat this season or if you have a favorite charity that you would like to donate the coat to, please do that. That would make us very happy,'” she said.

Kinkel said she paused, thinking there was a joke coming.

“I was thinking he wasn’t serious at all," she said. "From a humanitarian standpoint, it blew me away. It just profoundly touched me.”

The McKinney, Texas, mom wrote on Facebook about her customer service experience, hoping her post would go viral.

It generated tens of thousands of page views with some people commenting that they had similar experiences with zulily.

Crane Fowler wrote, “After seeing this, I immediately downloaded their app and will be making a purchase.”

Zulily doesn’t have a set-in-stone policy when it comes to donating customer returns, but says the goal is to make customers happy with 88 percent of them being repeat shoppers.

“Our ultimate goal at zulily is to deliver an exceptional customer experience. In an instance, such as this, when a customer reaches out to my team, we want to make sure that we do our best to have the customer leave with a positive interaction and experience with our brand. Like the breadth and depth of our product, each customer service experience is unique,” said zulily’s Maureen Shea who leads the company’s customer service team.

Kinkel said she has become a zulily fan for life.

“For people who are big time players in retail, I think they should take note," she said. "Because this is the kind of sentiment and these are the kind of core business values that are going to keep moms like me coming back time and time again."

As for the zulily coat, Kinkel plans to donate it this week to the Samaritan Inn in McKinney.

KIRO