What we did after 400 pairs went missing

By Eddie Cheng, founder of performance agency Penang Media and co-owner of global footwear brand VIBAe.

Last Friday in a VIBAe product meeting, two launches went on hold.

A shipment of about 400 pairs was stuck in Portugal. Roughly €100k of product we'd planned around.

We stared at the broken piece.

Then someone said the useful bit.

We already had stock on hand for one of them. Cognac and Sunflower Yellow.

So the launch wasn't dead. Just the shipment.

That's the whole problem.

When something on the back end breaks, the instinct is to freeze everything around it.

Ads pause. Email waits. The Q4 plan goes foggy until the ops problem clears.

I think that's usually the wrong move.

Here's why.

The warehouse problem is real. I'm not pretending it isn't.

But the front end doesn't need the missing pairs to keep working.

You can still write the email. You can still test the angle. You can still decide where attention goes for the rest of the quarter.

One thing broke.

Getting someone to care didn't.

In that meeting the useful question wasn't "where's the container."

It was what do we still have, and where's focus if this stays messy through Q4.

Stock already here. The colours we can actually sell. The ads and the list that don't care whether a truck is late.

Ops will keep throwing these at you. Lost stock. Late factories. A launch date that slips by a month.

You can't always fix that in the room.

You can almost always decide what still moves without it.

Ads. Email. Offer. Creative. The work that still moves while the warehouse sorts itself out.

Shit goes wrong. It will keep going wrong.

The brands that stall treat every ops fire as a reason to stop planning.

The ones that keep moving put the next hour back on the front end anyway.

The ops problem can stay big.

Sit on it long enough and you can lose a quarter you still had.

So if something broke for you this week, try the same split.

What's the ops problem you're allowed to park for an hour.

And what's the front-end move that still ships while it's stuck.

Hit reply and tell me which one you've been freezing on.

— Eddie