Learning from Mistakes

Let me set the scene of where I was out a few weeks after launching SÜK:

Sitting on the floor of my un-vacuumed rental with my head in my hands, surrounded by boxes of out-of-spec-unsellable garments, up to my eyeballs in debt and slightly hyperventilating.  

Glamorous.

I was already just slightly burnt out - it had been a race to the finish to get the first shipment ready as the bills staked up. And now, upon inspections, I was finding some inconsistencies in the sizing of the first production of garments -

Not even just that the sizing was wrong - that would have been easy - some of them were right and some of them were wrong - meaning that every single garment was going to need to be re-inspected. We had to produce over a thousand garments in this first run to meet the minimum orders to ensure that our workwear came somewhere close to a competitive price to standard men’s workwear, an aim I hung to doggedly in the years leading up to launch. My stubbornness felt like it was coming back now to bite me in the bum.

I was particularly dejected as I’d spent months with our production partners in Pakistan, making plans for careful production, performing inspections and having long conversations about the importance of quality over beautiful home-cooked meals. I had made real friends with them and felt we had covered all corners. I was struggling to figure out a solution.

And then I got the angriest email of my life. From someone who had bought a pair of pants in their usual size and had found them too small. The email tore me personally to shreds and said in no uncertain words that I was a fraud and a joke and shouldn’t have launched a business.

At the time it hit me because I agreed with the writer. I did feel like a fraud and in over my head. I longed to turn back time and rather than founding a workwear label, I wished I had quietly slinked into the shadows. Where it was quiet, the responsibility less and where I was comfortable.

But there I was, with my first shipment ready to go, five years of work already behind me, and of course, a bloody dream. The same bloody dream that had brought me to this stressful little hole I found myself in: to create something joyful and raw.

So I took a deep breath and re-read the email. I picked out the facts and discarded the personal stuff. And I rolled up my sleeves and got to work.

I made it literally my business to make our sizing EXCELLENT.  That night I started to reach out to customers asking for sizing feedback and that led to dozens of wonderful connections with generous, knowledgeable and supportive people - one of them being our garment developer Samantha, (more about her in future) which turned out to be a key factor in our sizing success.

Over the years, I have met and worked with so many people who have been so appreciative of how well our gear fits from size 4 to 30 - no other part of what we do seems to genuinely move people than this.

It came down to one nasty email and choosing to read the facts and forget the rest. I have learnt that you choose what fuels you, even when it seems like it’s slim pickings.