tl;dr: terribly made product; worse customer experience

Ed note: This is the review I attempted to post (three times!) on their website at https://weareplufl.com/products/hugl-cooling-body-pillow. I even mailed it to the customer service rep who I had been working with during this process in case it had gotten “lost.” However, despite my efforts, my review has gone unpublished (which is also extremely dishonest, IMHO). So, I’m doing what I said I would and publishing it here, even though this is not the sort of content I enjoy publishing.

Review below:

I really should write a long review that details my terrible experience, but I’m just ready to be done with anything having to do with Hugl or Plufl (makers of “the world’s first human dog bed”).  The bullet-point version:

• The cover of my “Hugl Cooling Body Pillow” began to pill within 2 weeks of receiving it
• The grommets on the cover had (a) sharp edges and (b) pulled away from the fabric tabs
• It was not comfortable at all — look at the angles of peoples’ heads and necks in the photos on their website: your head should align with your spine, but the Hugl is so overstuffed that it forces your head up at a crick-inducing angle
• Uncomfortable and defective? Yeah, I decided to return the product.  I was assuming that since it was defective (pilling cover with grommets that were pulling away from the fabric) they’d cover return shipping.  Nope.  They were willing to charge me **$60** so that I could return my defective product.
• I said I’d pay the return shipping (as I knew I could ship it more cheaply than $60) and only then did they offer to send me a new cover. 
• I pointed out that a new cover wasn’t likely to help unless they’d changed the design….
• And (again) only then did Hugl say they had changed the cover, because they’d received significant other complaints.
  • IOW: they told me there had been problems with the cover I had issues with only after I’d said I didn’t want a new cover. IMHO, they should have replied to my first email and said “Oh, we’re so sorry. Yes, the pilling is a known issue. Let us send you one of our new and improved covers free of charge.”
• Despite the fact that they’d (theoretically) fixed the Hugl cover at this point, by now I was fed up with the runaround (it had taken five email exchanges just to get this far!), dishonesty, and admittedly inferior product, so I said “no thank you. I don’t appreciate the way Hugl/Plufl runs, and I just want to return this product. I will pay my own return shipping fee to do so.”
• I packed and sent the thing back. HUGL received my (tracked) return on April 12. I did not receive my refund until May 1.  Almost three weeks to issue a credit for an item that they had received (and even acknowledged they received)

I’ve left out many of the smaller (yet equally frustrating) details (like being charged $60 return shipping when shipping via UPS was half that), but the bottom line is that if I am paying $150+ (or $199 at the current price, which is “on sale”) for a “luxury” product, I expect to:

• be able to return said product free of charge if it is defective
• be TOLD that the defect I have noted is a known issue and offered a replacement free of charge when I first start the return process
• receive a refund within 2 business days (4 maximum) of my return being received

I expect this review may vanish from the site (ed note: or it’ll never show up at all), so I’m also posting it on my social networks and website. I enjoy supporting smaller retailers and businesses that are trying to think outside the box; however, this experience has been closer to backing a Kickstarter that failed than purchasing from a legitimate enterprise. At least with Kickstarter you know you’re taking a gamble.

PS Were there any question about the legitimacy of this Plufl/Hugl, check out their shipping and returns policy:  https://weareplufl.com/pages/shipping-duties-and-return-information (ed note: this page was blank until recently. There are policies there now, but as you can see from my experience they are not following them.)

More thoughts after the fact

The company should have raised alarm bells for me from the start. This is a screenshot of one of the graphics on the Hugl page:

And, of course, the fact that their https://weareplufl.com/pages/shipping-duties-and-return-information is sometimes blank …yeah, that should have been a tip-off also.

Ugh. Do not make the mistake I did. Do not order from Hugl or Plufl. Do not trust the reviews on their site.