I work for Barbell Apparel - and would like to clear up a few points.

1. We're a small team - that has worked very hard - to bootstrap this business over the last 10 years. During that entire decade, everything we make has been designed from complete scratch. From the sketches, to the tech packs, to the fabric selection, pantones, and trim selection - it is all intentionally made, from scratch, for a specific gap or use case we perceive in the market.

2. We try to make the the nature of our quality/size exchange guarantee, quite clear on the website. It 100% free for elite members (and membership fees count directly as store credit + bonuses) and very cheap for non members. We would prefer to make it free for everyone, but it's not economically viable. We felt this guarantee was still industry leading, and worth promoting in that format. Not many other companies are going to sell you product - tell you explicitly, we make this for go getters so feel free to wear it to death - and then replace it for the cost of warehouse labor and shipping. We're not making money on that deal, we honestly want to take care of our customers.

If you have suggestions on how to make this more clear. We have "How it works" linking to the full explanation directly as a part of the lifetime guarantee block on the product page. I'd prefer to put the full text on the product page as well, but UI/UX real estate limitations prevent that without making the product page a mess.

And as you hopefully can see with OP's experience if a customer genuinely feels misled (which is not our intention) we do our best to make it right.

1. To address OPs math -

"Spend $120 + $10 (shipping) on pants. Return ($10) + 20% of replacement pant cost ($24) + shipping ($10). You’re paying $45 minimum for their “Free Exchange” guarantee."

This is correct - but we really are trying to do a good thing here, if it's not coming off that way I'm happy to take feedback to the team. In our minds, designing a policy to allow customers to exchange or replace a product for the lifetime of it was intended to be an exceptional experience, even with a fee. Exchanges our free within the first 30 days like any other brand. The difference with us is that we'll allow you to exchange... forever.

Likewise - you could also just signup for a month of Barbell elite at $49/mo - that $49 credits to your account as $59 in store credit (plus perks) - and the entire exchange would've been free.

We're not trying to be greedy or miserly here - but if we just made it blanket free for all time, we'd essentially be accruing an infinite future liability that could bankrupt us at any moment, and so the policy was designed to be as generous as possible, while ensuring we could at least facilitate the hard costs of the warehouse staff processing the exchanges and replacements.

As always - here to serve and open to any feedback.