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Bonjour Millionaire, 

It's storming here in New York and my ALAÏA ballet flats will never be the same (and I think I'm still cold). My sister wore chunky boots and I made fun of her in my head because it's summer but I'm the dumbalina and she was right.

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ON THIS EPISODE OF GO-TO-MILLIONS 

Warning: horror story.

Have you guys ever put Gluten into a Gluten-Free Box? At my 1st job, I started as CX agent and we sold snacks. Healthy snacks to offices and also DTC to individual customers via Facebook ads that would at a $4 CPA. It was a longtime ago but certain parts of it are fresh.

Back to the gluten. I had just been promoted away from CX and into merchandising and was feeling prettyyyyyyy proud of my 23 year old self. The person I took over from was excellent and he left to start his own snack company (icon) and all was great. Except in my 1st week in the new role, Gluten Free Watchdogs tweeted that there was GLUTEN in 1 of the snacks in our previous month's shipment. That's not good when you're selling something as Gluten Free, but you already guessed that part I assume.

I won't get into what came next but it wasn't pretty. Was it my fault? No, I was crushing tickets in Zendesk when this was shipped out. Do I still feel traumatized when I think about it? Yes, hence the eat glass gif I spent 30 minutes looking for that I dropped in above.

But we have to talk about these things!! Because 23 year old me lived through a recall and we all have a fucking million of these nightmare stories that we've collected along the way because shipping physical goods to trusting consumers is high-stakes.

Today is story time, a minute to look back at the times I learned the hard way, in the hopes that you can learn the easy way where possible from my pain. SO MUCH PAIN!!!

Grab a cuppa and don't let this be the last time we talk about this. Operational excellence is a shared responsibility with marketing and I'm marketing! But I'm not trying to return the sales I just made because I need them. I really need each and every order and I don't want any mistakes. We'll talk about what I do to keep things tight (especially during BFCM) and I'm also bringing in the CEO of 1 of the biggest 3PLs in our space to guide us through the processes that work. It's on July 28th and free if you want to not get trucked I highly recommend we strategize on this together. TYSM!

OPERATIONAL PHILOSOPHY

As operations can be a universal point of failure, I just want to make sure we're all on the same page that ops is the most important.

I always talk about being detail-oriented and loving pressure-testing things, but there's flaw in every process and everything can go wrong. What do you do to just not let that be the reason?

Like how can you respect your customers and your team so much that you can devise rules and plans and procedures that get in front of the nightmares? It's possible, and I've seen it but it requires everyone refusing disaster and working together to avoid.

THE DISASTERS THAT MADE ME

I did say that it was storytime.

1 time I worked with a very famous brand and on the 1st day working with them I was alerted that, and I quote: "We have like 20,000 orders from 4 months ago that still haven't shipped because we don't have the product and we don't want to refund them and sometimes the Better Business Bureau contacts us and here is what we do in that scenario."

This is why I always talk about chargebacks and shipping product that's in warehouse and having warnings on the PDPs NEXT TO THE BUY BUTTON when something is about to be purchased that isn't shipping out within a few days.

Because of the BBB (better business bureau, as they called it internally). We don't want to be at the place where that acronym is efficient to use. Aligned?

Aligned.

1 time I was on a call where the CEO of a different company (not the BBB company) was asking the owner of her 3PL to fake trigger shipment labels so that customers would get notified that their order was shipped. She wanted the labels printed even though the thousands of items that were on backorder were still in the middle of the ocean somewhere en route to the warehouse.

She wanted customers to stop writing in, so that was the solution. The 3PL said no. Which I secretly was very glad about because it was absolutely the wrong call. Its really not fun to be the solider of a bad idea and especially earlier on in my career, there's only so loud your voice can get in that room and I'm just glad when bad ideas get stopped. It's a weird place to be.

1 time I worked on a launch (last year, still agency-side) where the launch just went so unbelievably better than expected that the 3PL did not have the physical power to ship the volumes out. Took weeks and weeks to get launch day orders out which is a nightmare but a growing pain that a lot of us have caused by growing quickly and by beating a shaky net-new brand launch forecast (a forecast based on math but not on past customer behavior).

I bring this story up ^^ because yes this was somewhat unpredicted but the issue arose when the brand chose not to proactively email customers with status updates, or to stop selling once it became clear there was a massive backlog. These are choices and I understand that every business is different, and we need to spend time together unpacking what we each do or would do in each of these scenarios. And we will.

GLUTEN FREE WATCHDOGS

When we unpacked how that specific gluten issue happened, it was pretty easy to see. And, it wasn't about 1 person making a mistake. It was about the fact that even if you assume that everyone is amazing and that everyone will at 1 point make a mistake, you avoid the mistake by not letting something as important as this rely on 1 person and you CHANGE THE SYSTEM.

All that we did to fix this for future is that the curation and BOM switched hands with physical checks across like 10 people from there on out. In the office I'd photograph and hand-confirm the label of the items, then I'd pass the items to the next person, to the next, to the next. I'd get back from a meeting and see a box sitting on my desk and it would be my turn.

And we eliminated the single point of failure and I never stopped acting like that from there on out.

Even now, back on the marketing side, I work on a team where we have genuinely 4 approvers on each of our emails that we send. 4ish approvers on the ads we create. Because certain things can't be called back and the internet is forever and reputation is everything. So is making sure the physical things we're shipping out really should leave the warehouse.

All is connected! We have to keep talking about this!

And we shouldn't go at it alone.

Today I will wear the ALAÏA flats again because my other option is loafers that hurt my feet and my 3rd and final option is high heels that I waddle in.

The carry on life does not suit me and I tried to buy shoes at Uniqlo yesterday when we ran inside to SEEK SHELTER from the storm lol but they do not sell shoes and I did not know that. So then we ran to Bergdorf's and the only shoes I liked were suede so we decided to rough it and bought all new makeup instead (carry on friendly) which I don't regret but then again, I'm currently inside and not shivering.

Yours,
Ari