The sprayer stopped working
Updated
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Chemical attack is the slow one
A gasket that has swollen or a piston that has seized after a month in contact with your formula. It passes every test you did on the day of filling and fails in a customer’s hands, which is the worst shape a failure can take.
Clogging at the nozzle
Product drying in the orifice between uses, or a formula with anything suspended in it. A locked trigger slows the drying considerably, which is one of the quieter arguments for specifying a lock.
Viscosity outside the trigger specification
Triggers have a range and a product thicker than it will pull hard, spray unevenly or not prime. A silicone dressing and a glass cleaner are different enough that one sprayer rarely suits both.
Leaking is usually the closure, not the trigger
A sprayer that seats but does not seal leaks when the bottle is laid down, which these bottles always are. Check the gasket against the neck finish rather than assuming the thread match is the whole job.
Corrosion in aqueous products
An exposed metal spring in a water-based formula rusts, discoloring the product and eventually jamming the mechanism. If the formula is aqueous, specifying an all-plastic sprayer removes the failure entirely.
Keep one from each run and use it
Filled, labeled, and used occasionally over the following months. Every failure on this page is a slow one, and a retained unit is the only way to see them before a customer does.
Match the failure to the cause before reordering
A stiff trigger, a weak spray and a wet neck have different causes and different fixes. Swapping supplier without knowing which one you had usually reproduces the same failure a few months later with a different part number on the invoice.