Startup Life Sucks. Thanks For Believing in Us.

It was cold in the warehouse too. Waaa.

Brutally honest moment: the startup life is un-fucking-believably hard. Like juggling a bunch of chainsaws (they’re on fire) while wobbling your way across a tightrope (also on fire) and belting out your best attempt at an early-2000’s Beyonce tune. It’s not impossible. It’s just… hard. 

We can see the light at the end of the tunnel now, but, phew, what a journey the last few months have been.

When we founded Stitchfox, we thought we knew some stuff about juggling life/work/chainsaws.  We were a couple of hyper-excited dads with an enormous dream, and we thought that “success” was going to be about moving fast and breaking the rules, because we were goddamn startup entrepreneurs. 

Turns out: we were also pretty green. Disrupting the world of kids’ retail was going to be a gigantic job, and we were just getting started. We were only sending out a few boxes a week from our HQ (a.k.a Greg’s mum’s basement) — so when word started to spread about Stitchfox, we were stoked. It felt like all our peeps were coming together in one place  — and they all believed in us. 

One day, we woke up and realised every single member of our growing tribe was trusting us, and relying on us to deliver for them. It was *exactly* then that shit started to hit the fan. 

We ran out of stock. We stuck bandaids on things that needed surgery, and ran out of time to communicate properly with our customers. Pretty soon, we stopped eating, sleeping, and hanging out with our kids. It was garbage. 

So we tried to make things better. Our biggest problem was logistics, so we decided to move our Stitchfox operations into a commercial warehouse. Once we got there, we still wanted to style each box to our customer’s individual needs… so we broke a lot of rules. But in a warehouse where mountains of stock move back and forth every day, you literally cannot break rules.

Needless to say, things didn’t get better. 

Clipboads. Am I right?

The worst part was knowing we were letting a whole lot of awesome, loyal mums down. Our situation had become an absolute, ongoing, garbage dump fire — and no amount of witty Facebook messages or profit refunds were gonna make up for it. 

Every morning, we dreaded the fresh avalanche of SOS texts. For us, this exchange from a Stitchfox Mama (Hey, Felicity!) really hit home: 

“I hate contacting you but another week has passed and still nothing has arrived 😪 ...It has now been two weeks since we spoke and you assured me that it was being posted the next day… Not feeling the love from your company at all. Left feeling really disappointed."

Sigh. Felicity really hit it on the head. Our hearts sank as we read on. 

"...It’s fair to say I love the concept and love the clothes we receive… My main frustration comes from [the fact that] I love to share awesome things and I tell lots of my clients about it, and send them your way. Hopefully they join up. Word of mouth is huge in today’s rat race, but if the service to them was like this, I would be disappointed that I had recommended it to them. 

I think what you have is amazing… So I’m giving it another chance, I don’t really want to stop it, and I want to see you succeed. [But] let’s give it a real customer service push, and I look forward to the box."

Felicity summed it up for us. Long story short: it wasn’t good enough. 

That’s why literally as you read these words, we’re running a massive stocktake on every piece of clothing we’ve got — down to the last pair of newborn socks. We’re making some huge changes and streamlining our styling process so we can get this machine humming again. No more “Oh shit, the engine fell out!”

We promise.

Bottom line: it hasn’t been all “roses and sunshine,” but our Mamas have been so brutally, beautifully honest (and gracious) with us. Better yet, they’ve continued to believe in this crazy new thing we’re building. So before we go any further, we want to thank ALL THE MAMAS who have chosen to come with us on this Stitchfox journey. 

We’ve been learning and growing the hard way... and we’re SO GRATEFUL to you all for bearing with us — and our growing pains.

We are going to do something special for all of you, for realsies... hope you stay tuned.

Much love,

Greg, Bobby, Tiff, Clare & Marcelo

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