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Comment by madaxe_again | Hacker News Reader

Worked in ecommerce for a decade, knew innards at NG through a few sources.

They overspent on tech which they always thought would last forever. "Yeah, let's spend $11M on a redesign. It'll last forever"

They bought way too much stock, and never worked with size curves, just flat ranges.

These are common problems in small/young retailers - just most of them don't fail quite so spectacularly on other people's money.

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By "flat ranges" you mean they bought approximately the same number of garments for each available size?

Yes. Cheaper to buy, but harder to sell. Experienced fashion retailers (and wholesalers/"manufacturers") have crazy detailed models to buy exactly what they should sell and very little more. Demand velocity based mostly, and when done well, sliced by category/range.

Unsold stuff usually goes through a bulk shredder - some of the more ethical ones send it to charity. What you see in outlets and seconds stores is usually made specifically for those outlets.

I got very jaded after a decade of watching the madness, left a few months back.

>They bought way too much stock, and never worked with size curves, just flat ranges.

Oh dear... I can get bringing in too much stock, It is understandable as a new young company that you overestimate sales of some items but not working with size curves is just plain unprofessional.

Ouch. I worked in ecommerce for five years myself and thought the companies that spent 20-50k on a site we could knock out with prebuilt components in a week or two was rough. Apparently we should have been tacking some zeros on there.

The agency I ran would charge at least £200k a year (full service) - and we were mid range - and when retailers choose to do things in-house or with a big provider, things go into the millions rapidly.

Yes, you should have been! I worked for a company that had this problem. The directors founded the company straight out of university and consequently had no experience of the industry to draw on.

I'm wondering if you worked for me, but with hindsight I realise this is a common problem. We underpriced ourselves by orders of magnitude for years.

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