In January 2019, we made a crucial decision that significantly impacted Archibald's future. At that time, we were running two related businesses: Archibald (the brand) and a separate tech company that developed custom e-commerce infrastructure, which we leased to other brands. Since July 2016, we had been focusing more on the technology side, creating one of the most advanced e-commerce frameworks in the market, using Archibald as our main testing ground. This was partly due to the fact that in many ways we hadn't quite found our footing or true market fit with Archibald.
This section is called the journal and truthfully should have served as just that. Not trite content or your general blog post confusing content with opportunities to sell but instead an authentic account of things we are doing/have done to build Archibald out and the various successes and challenges. On that note, this post, is a rather lengthy account of one of the (perhaps more important, never before discussed) issues we faced over the past few years. It is technical and therefore only read-on if you are genuinely interested.
Archibald's positioning was based on the assumption that existing direct-to-consumer players would fizzle out. At the time, DTC was a darling with venture capitalists and some private equity firms, and a lot of "hot" money was flowing into "disruptive" plays of all types. However, the preferred model was your typical DTC entrant selling an entry-level product for slightly less (Warby Parker was an entry-level pair of Ray-Bans paired with entry-level lenses for $40 cheaper). Everlane was basically an entry-level version of J.Crew, re-packaged as sustainable and with a killer price breakdown graphic. Then you had concepts like AWAY travel, etc., which we will refrain from commenting on too much.
Archibald aimed at something different: to prioritize quality, delight customers, and hold them for life. So we believed that the typical 'millennial-trap' direct-to-consumer idea of branding entry-level as premium and disruptive would catch on with customers. While it might work to attract people via good marketing, the customers would "grow up" and graduate to higher quality alternatives (and most likely traditional retail) when they figure out it was all a bit of a scam. And we observed it live; customers would often purchase the item, likely purchase again within a 12-month window, and then move on to other brands and a concept like ours was positioned to capture that customer. We didn't think building a brand that operated like a revolving door for customers was a good business model and didn't see the point in creating a loss-making flywheel where 70% of capital was paid out to Facebook (there was a statistic once published showing most of the capital raised by DTC brands between 2012-2019 was paid out to Facebook and Google). Still, institutional capital at the time wasn't looking for logic but for brands that could show low customer acquisition costs and fit the framework they believed could scale fast. And to be fair we never really got to test how Archibald would have fared in that playing ground, if we had the capital to invest in the customer acquisition AND our quality could keep the customer, would that mean we would have a profitable business by Sale 2 onwards?
In this regard, we existed with a contrarian thesis as far as institutional capital was concerned. So we knew the game was first to survive until the market proved us right (it did when DTC brands started falling off and plateauing in early 2020 when the costs to advertise digitally skyrocketed, which was only compounded by interest rates increasing) and secondly to prepare ourselves to be able to capture the opportunity when it presents itself (mainly through systems and infrastructure). It only made sense that our efforts, in general, were focused on equipping ourselves with these tools that would allow us to seize the moment efficiently.
The pivotal decision in 2019 was made to rebuild the framework using an experimental technology from Microsoft. The architect of this change anticipated it would take six months, but it ended up taking 18 months and costing five times more than expected. This shift turned out to be fantastic and a disaster. Instead of continuing with our innovative "headless" e-commerce system, we created a fork in the road and focused on a monolithic one (a single, large system). This change was driven by the tech team's curiosity rather than sound business reasoning and an understanding of e-commerce trends. The lesson we learned was clear: large technical decisions cannot be made unilaterally by a single person, especially someone sitting in an authoritative position within the organization. If we did not have someone internal capable of questioning the move, then we should have looked elsewhere and made sure that an external group of software engineers vetted every significant decision before incorporating in the product. Now, this isn't to say the move did not bear fruit - using the Blazor framework to power the administrative end of our system has had its benefits (we think), but extending its usage to the consumer-facing end of Archibald was a big, big mistake.
At the same time, our "Naked" campaign thrived and masked the underlying issues. We were more excited by the commercial success we were experiencing and the initiative fit perfectly for the moment we were experiencing. Although sales were up, they were costly, and while our advertising was working, it should have been more effective. We were also finalizing a funding round with a venture capitalist. Then, the "handwelted-gate" scandal hit, bringing everything to a halt. By mid-2021, when the “good times” were officially over we realized the full extent of our predicament.
The fallout was severe. Financial losses, a drop in trust, and the flawed integration of Microsoft's Blazor technology caused our search rankings to plummet and made our site difficult to use on iOS, a key platform for our customers. Effectively, we made a change and incorporated technology that wasn’t built, optimized, or suitable for consumer-facing applications. Many of you expressed frustration with the website's performance; whatever small ad campaigns we ran would suffer as would-be customers would ditch the site frustrated, and we could not resolve the issues on Archibald quickly.
As we prepared to close Naked at the end of Q1 2021, we prioritized the development of the original membership programs, crowdfunding, and pre-order management systems so everyone was incredibly busy on fairly large builds. These initiatives were in progress before we realized the true extent of the Blazor debacle and before the "hand welted" incident. Therefore, we couldn’t afford to simply migrate the resources to undo what was a silly decision. Then we had the decision on how to rectify it. Some schools of thought suggested doubling down on the framework and integrating it fully, others said "don't be oversmart and ditch the mistake".
Other brands using our system also grew frustrated with the time it took us to resolve Blazor's inherent kinks. Consequently, despite patches and workarounds that restored performance, they abandoned our system, worsening the combined situation and forcing us to cut more resources. This made it more difficult to start walking it back.
Effectively, every problem we faced as a business began with two key issues: the shoemakers’ duplicitous decision to switch out the product and the incorporation of the Blazor framework, which negatively impacted both businesses. Navigating through these challenges has been incredibly difficult, especially as we had to run Naked for so long (so no margin) to keep the product flowing without budgets for marketing, development, or building. Despite these obstacles, the financial losses, and the opportunity cost from time lost, we have emerged stronger.
We should have always ensured the site was perfect to welcome new customers into our community. We were hit on both ends by operating a site that wasn't, especially during the delays in sneaker production deliveries throughout 2023. The delays infuriated many community members and led to a significant loss of trust. At the same time, the only shopping channel wasn’t optimized to bring new customers in. So what ended up happening was an almost blackout - plagued by a series of 1-star reviews (many underserved, though admittedly the product was delayed significantly), and an advertising blackout. So, there was no direct marketing, little word-of-mouth (of course, some kicked in when items were actually delivered), and a compromised experience for new customers.
To help with a large migration, which involved re-coding the entire Archibald site from Blazor to React, re-configuring the framework to work with any front-end technology, connecting both, and finally converting from React to NextJS, we leveraged AI coding assistants. This made it possible for a much smaller team to execute the changes much faster, achieving something far beyond what our budgets would have allowed even 12 months ago.
We assigned a dedicated team to rebuild our site using NextJS, aiming for a four-month timeline. Although we are now three months past our original estimate, the scope has expanded considerably. We are set to launch the new site in the next 48 hours. While the site will look the same, we will implement all the user-experience improvements we've planned over the years one by one.
The worst is behind us; we are poised for something explosive and positive. We’ve taken control of our situation and are committed to building the business we always envisioned.
Thank you for standing by us.
The changes should be live within 48 hours. We will conduct initial tests but have decided to push the change live rather than delay it any longer, as we have many initiatives we have held back while waiting for this change. The site is likely to be bug-ridden, and we anticipate there will be a lot we haven’t thought about. By making this change, we effectively brought our internal technology stack back from the dead, modernized it, and have done so with a fifth of the resources we had back in 2020 so it is a big moment, and hopefully, we will succeed.
On that note, we will do something a bit crazy and ask you, our community, to help find issues on the site.
Any bugs reported that haven’t already been logged will be rewarded in kind with site credit.
This section is called the journal and truthfully should have served as just that. Not trite content or your general blog post confusing content with opportunities to sell but instead an authentic account of things we are doing/have done to build Archibald out and the various successes and challenges. On that note, this post, is a rather lengthy account of one of the (perhaps more important, never before discussed) issues we faced over the past few years. It is technical and therefore only read-on if you are genuinely interested.
Archibald's positioning was based on the assumption that existing direct-to-consumer players would fizzle out. At the time, DTC was a darling with venture capitalists and some private equity firms, and a lot of "hot" money was flowing into "disruptive" plays of all types. However, the preferred model was your typical DTC entrant selling an entry-level product for slightly less (Warby Parker was an entry-level pair of Ray-Bans paired with entry-level lenses for $40 cheaper). Everlane was basically an entry-level version of J.Crew, re-packaged as sustainable and with a killer price breakdown graphic. Then you had concepts like AWAY travel, etc., which we will refrain from commenting on too much.
Archibald aimed at something different: to prioritize quality, delight customers, and hold them for life. So we believed that the typical 'millennial-trap' direct-to-consumer idea of branding entry-level as premium and disruptive would catch on with customers. While it might work to attract people via good marketing, the customers would "grow up" and graduate to higher quality alternatives (and most likely traditional retail) when they figure out it was all a bit of a scam. And we observed it live; customers would often purchase the item, likely purchase again within a 12-month window, and then move on to other brands and a concept like ours was positioned to capture that customer. We didn't think building a brand that operated like a revolving door for customers was a good business model and didn't see the point in creating a loss-making flywheel where 70% of capital was paid out to Facebook (there was a statistic once published showing most of the capital raised by DTC brands between 2012-2019 was paid out to Facebook and Google). Still, institutional capital at the time wasn't looking for logic but for brands that could show low customer acquisition costs and fit the framework they believed could scale fast. And to be fair we never really got to test how Archibald would have fared in that playing ground, if we had the capital to invest in the customer acquisition AND our quality could keep the customer, would that mean we would have a profitable business by Sale 2 onwards?
In this regard, we existed with a contrarian thesis as far as institutional capital was concerned. So we knew the game was first to survive until the market proved us right (it did when DTC brands started falling off and plateauing in early 2020 when the costs to advertise digitally skyrocketed, which was only compounded by interest rates increasing) and secondly to prepare ourselves to be able to capture the opportunity when it presents itself (mainly through systems and infrastructure). It only made sense that our efforts, in general, were focused on equipping ourselves with these tools that would allow us to seize the moment efficiently.
The pivotal decision in 2019 was made to rebuild the framework using an experimental technology from Microsoft. The architect of this change anticipated it would take six months, but it ended up taking 18 months and costing five times more than expected. This shift turned out to be fantastic and a disaster. Instead of continuing with our innovative "headless" e-commerce system, we created a fork in the road and focused on a monolithic one (a single, large system). This change was driven by the tech team's curiosity rather than sound business reasoning and an understanding of e-commerce trends. The lesson we learned was clear: large technical decisions cannot be made unilaterally by a single person, especially someone sitting in an authoritative position within the organization. If we did not have someone internal capable of questioning the move, then we should have looked elsewhere and made sure that an external group of software engineers vetted every significant decision before incorporating in the product. Now, this isn't to say the move did not bear fruit - using the Blazor framework to power the administrative end of our system has had its benefits (we think), but extending its usage to the consumer-facing end of Archibald was a big, big mistake.
At the same time, our "Naked" campaign thrived and masked the underlying issues. We were more excited by the commercial success we were experiencing and the initiative fit perfectly for the moment we were experiencing. Although sales were up, they were costly, and while our advertising was working, it should have been more effective. We were also finalizing a funding round with a venture capitalist. Then, the "handwelted-gate" scandal hit, bringing everything to a halt. By mid-2021, when the “good times” were officially over we realized the full extent of our predicament.
The fallout was severe. Financial losses, a drop in trust, and the flawed integration of Microsoft's Blazor technology caused our search rankings to plummet and made our site difficult to use on iOS, a key platform for our customers. Effectively, we made a change and incorporated technology that wasn’t built, optimized, or suitable for consumer-facing applications. Many of you expressed frustration with the website's performance; whatever small ad campaigns we ran would suffer as would-be customers would ditch the site frustrated, and we could not resolve the issues on Archibald quickly.
As we prepared to close Naked at the end of Q1 2021, we prioritized the development of the original membership programs, crowdfunding, and pre-order management systems so everyone was incredibly busy on fairly large builds. These initiatives were in progress before we realized the true extent of the Blazor debacle and before the "hand welted" incident. Therefore, we couldn’t afford to simply migrate the resources to undo what was a silly decision. Then we had the decision on how to rectify it. Some schools of thought suggested doubling down on the framework and integrating it fully, others said "don't be oversmart and ditch the mistake".
Other brands using our system also grew frustrated with the time it took us to resolve Blazor's inherent kinks. Consequently, despite patches and workarounds that restored performance, they abandoned our system, worsening the combined situation and forcing us to cut more resources. This made it more difficult to start walking it back.
Effectively, every problem we faced as a business began with two key issues: the shoemakers’ duplicitous decision to switch out the product and the incorporation of the Blazor framework, which negatively impacted both businesses. Navigating through these challenges has been incredibly difficult, especially as we had to run Naked for so long (so no margin) to keep the product flowing without budgets for marketing, development, or building. Despite these obstacles, the financial losses, and the opportunity cost from time lost, we have emerged stronger.
We should have always ensured the site was perfect to welcome new customers into our community. We were hit on both ends by operating a site that wasn't, especially during the delays in sneaker production deliveries throughout 2023. The delays infuriated many community members and led to a significant loss of trust. At the same time, the only shopping channel wasn’t optimized to bring new customers in. So what ended up happening was an almost blackout - plagued by a series of 1-star reviews (many underserved, though admittedly the product was delayed significantly), and an advertising blackout. So, there was no direct marketing, little word-of-mouth (of course, some kicked in when items were actually delivered), and a compromised experience for new customers.
To help with a large migration, which involved re-coding the entire Archibald site from Blazor to React, re-configuring the framework to work with any front-end technology, connecting both, and finally converting from React to NextJS, we leveraged AI coding assistants. This made it possible for a much smaller team to execute the changes much faster, achieving something far beyond what our budgets would have allowed even 12 months ago.
We assigned a dedicated team to rebuild our site using NextJS, aiming for a four-month timeline. Although we are now three months past our original estimate, the scope has expanded considerably. We are set to launch the new site in the next 48 hours. While the site will look the same, we will implement all the user-experience improvements we've planned over the years one by one.
The worst is behind us; we are poised for something explosive and positive. We’ve taken control of our situation and are committed to building the business we always envisioned.
Thank you for standing by us.
The changes should be live within 48 hours. We will conduct initial tests but have decided to push the change live rather than delay it any longer, as we have many initiatives we have held back while waiting for this change. The site is likely to be bug-ridden, and we anticipate there will be a lot we haven’t thought about. By making this change, we effectively brought our internal technology stack back from the dead, modernized it, and have done so with a fifth of the resources we had back in 2020 so it is a big moment, and hopefully, we will succeed.
On that note, we will do something a bit crazy and ask you, our community, to help find issues on the site.
Any bugs reported that haven’t already been logged will be rewarded in kind with site credit.
