When a residential property owner in Shediac, New Brunswick first noticed the vinyl siding on her home beginning to warp and buckle, she had no reason to suspect that the path from that initial observation to a courtroom would take years or that the timeline of events would become central to a dispute about insurance coverage. The siding had been purchased from a building supply company, 179 pieces in total, and installed by a contractor she had hired independently. The failures appeared gradually at first, then returned with greater severity after repairs were attempted, and by the time formal litigation commenced, the property owner was seeking $68,229.40 in damages. What makes this timeline significant for purposes of the "your product" exclusion is not simply when things went wrong, but how the sequence of events shapes the legal characterization of the loss and, ultimately, whether the building supply company's commercial general liability insurer would be required to respond to the claim.
The progression from product sale to litigation rarely follows a clean linear path, and understanding how each stage connects to the coverage question requires careful attention to what was happening at each moment and why it matters. A commercial general liability policy responds to occurrences that cause bodily injury or property damage during the policy period, but the "your product" exclusion operates as a carve-out that removes certain categories of loss from the insuring agreement's reach. The exclusion does not care whether the product was defective at the moment of sale or whether it performed adequately for months or years before failing. What the exclusion targets is the character of the damage claimed, and that character often cannot be understood without tracing the product's journey from the insured's hands through installation, use, failure, and eventual claim. The timeline is not merely background narrative; it is the evidentiary foundation upon which coverage arguments are built or demolished.