[Silound]

I actually have to stand up and defend Colibri at this point, strange as it may seem.

The company went through several changes of hands in the last 15 years before the current company as it is today came to exist about 3 years ago. Now, most of the newer Colibri lighters I've played with are equal in quality to the older ones from the 80's and early 90's.

As someone who sold a few thousand lighters in the last 5 years of my life, I can honestly say that I have only seen one Lambo lighter come back for repairs (replaced off the shelf, replaced by Colibri in a week), and I actually see very few of the newer Colibri lighters come back with any kind of severe problems. I would stand by Colibri right now as much as I would stand by Blazer or Xikar.




For those who care about the backstory, the original family owned company was bought out in the late 90's by some form of a private equity group. That group proceeded to push the company down the well known path of destruction that ended with over a hundred lines of crappy lighters, only a couple of which were worth a damn.

In late 2008, the equity firm petitioned the company into receivership after the company had nearly $25M in debt due to poor management and was actually unable to turn an operating profit, and in Feb 2009, they literally abandoned the company and closed the doors one night. Workers showed up the next day to find a note of the doors effectively telling them they were fired, the company was done, and to leave. It made quite a stink with workers demanding severance, etc etc.

In June of 2009, the company was purchased by the entrepreneurial firm Alliance Time, who proceeded to immediately gut the company top to bottom. Traveling representatives were hired and given territories, over 2/3 of the lighter models were immediately discontinued, the lifetime warranty service was re-instated to vendors (it had been previously halted to cut costs), and new lines of lighters were launched covering a wide range of prices. Today, new Colibri lighters have a 3-year complete customer warranty, a lifetime vendor shelf-replacement warranty (same off-the-shelf replacement system Xikar uses), and are manufactured using better quality parts.