As an environmentally focused fashion brand, how should we deal with faulty stock?
WORDS BY JESS AND STEF DADON
“It was thousands of shoes, paid for, completely imperfect and not at all the quality that customers should and would be expecting from us.”
Our footwear brand Twoobs has experienced a real growth spurt in the last year. She’s kind of gone from being our little baby child to this gangly tween what seems like overnight, and we’re still figuring out how to parent her. Recently, we royally screwed it up.
Due to all this growth, over the last year, our products have often been sold out or on pre-order on our website. It’s been a little frustrating for our customers, and as a team, we’ve been busy behind the scenes trying to strike a balance between giving our community what they want and taking things slow. It’s important to us to hold the environment at the heart of our business – it’s literally our whole reason for being, and what gets us out of bed in the morning.
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But in the lead-up to Christmas last year, we got that balance really wrong, and completely sold out of all our best-selling colours and sizes (hello, lavender platforms). As a sandal brand, we weren’t thrilled that in the hottest months of the year, we had nothing to offer and it did seem to annoy quite a lot of people.
So we decided to place a bigger-than-usual order of beautiful shoes to ensure over the coming six months, we wouldn’t run into the same issues. Cut to a few months ago when the order arrived. As we were looking at them, we started noticing a pretty large portion of our stock just wasn’t to the level of quality we had grown to expect.
We’re not talking massive imperfections, but some shoes had things like glue visibly showing, while others had cracks in the bases or discolouration on the platforms. They were faults that meant we just weren’t comfortable sending the shoes out and claiming they were meant to be that way. It was basically our worst nightmare.
It was thousands of shoes, paid for, completely imperfect and not at all the quality that customers should and would be expecting from us. Many stressful late-night Zoom calls to our factory followed as we tried to piece together what happened and what exactly we were going to do about it. Our factory ended up offering to refund us for all the faulty items they had already sent – we’re talking full 100 per cent refund money-back vibes.
Initially, this might sound like a good option, but the general idea is when a factory refunds a brand, that brand dumps the faulty stock into a landfill. You don’t have to dive too deep on the internet to read about all the luxury and fast fashion brands who have been caught dumping faulty and unsold stock into landfill, or even burning it. To be honest, even though in 2023 that sounds preposterous, it’s still known to be pretty common practice among big retailers.
Of course at Twoobs, this was never going to be an option for us, and while for a moment we considered recycling them, recycling slightly imperfect but absolutely wearable shoes felt irresponsible. Not to mention that from an ethical standpoint, letting our factory refund us for 100 per cent of the stock they bought raw materials for and paid staff to make felt really, really wrong.
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And then one day, the solution hit us and we created Oopsys. Rather than trying to do the classic brand trick of covering up what’s going on behind the scenes, we wanted to be completely transparent with our customers. We’d own the fact that we’d made a giant mistake (or 2,944 of them), and we would sell those shoes at 25 per cent off.
Our factory would still keep most of the money for manufacturing them (they’d refund us around 25 per cent of our cost price to reflect the need for a discount for customers), and the shoes would get to go to loving homes. In line with our mission to save the planet and not overload it with stuff people don’t need, we never go on sale. So this wasn’t a decision we came to lightly. What would people say when they realised we were discounting? Was this completely hypocritical of us?
Customers actually couldn’t have been more supportive of the way we handled things, and while we never know how something is going to be received, it was such a nice reminder that when you genuinely care and you’re acting from a good place, you can never go wrong with the truth.
People who’d wanted to snag a pair but found the price was an obstacle were able to buy into the brand. We deeply exhaled when the shoes were sent out and we received happy reviews from customers, saying they couldn’t even tell that their shoes were Oopsys.
We want to be clear – we know the shoes we make are our responsibility. To ensure this doesn’t happen again, we’ve asked our factory to work slower and have pushed out all our production times, giving them more time to perfect each pair. We’ll also have a third party doing extra quality checks at more points during production so we can catch any issues early.
Being an ethical business isn’t easy. But taking the easy way out isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, especially when our planet and the people on it need us to step up now more than ever. So while these last couple of months have been a little bumpy (just like our shoes), we’re so happy we’ve been able to make lemonade with our misshaped lemons, while using the situation to raise awareness around some of the ugliest parts of the fashion industry.
You can shop Twoobs Oopsys here.
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