Glen's Live Recap!

Glen went live and then did a Q&A sesh in the FB group today! You can catch the replay HERE.

Here's a quick recap of the (very long) live:

We’re officially three weeks in to our pilot launches and wanted to chat a bit about what we’ve learned, what is working well, what challenges have come up, etc. We also wanted to offer some additional context about the pilot and some of the overall shifts at Ave over the last few months.

We understand that it’s human nature to create a narrative or fill in the blanks when there is uncertainty or frustration. But we also see a lot of misinformation circulating around, so wanted to touch on a few of those topics as well.

There is SO MUCH happening lately! You guys are feeling it, our team is feeling it, the entire industry is feeling it. Some people have been super excited about the changes and others haven’t. We can't please everyone, but we continue to try and work towards solutions that benefit the greatest good for Ave + as many of you as possible.

We sincerely appreciate the shops who saw the value in Ave Shops over the years and chose to invest in the paid monthly membership. But the reality is that despite having our highest revenue year ever in 2023, we’ve seen a significant downward trend in monthly sales from almost every single shop who partners with us. Even with a higher number of total shops our monthly sales and order volumes are still way down from where they were previously.

As a company, we love innovation. We pioneered this boutique drop ship model that everyone has grown to love and depend on so much, and we’re always trying to figure out ways to evolve and serve you better. One of the main reasons we shifted to a free service was so that we could be more creative and try new things to meet the current industry demands. In this economic climate we just can’t keep assuming such massive amounts of financial and inventory risk, but we want to continue serving you well. 

All of these factors came together to bring us to the idea of the pilot launches…

The point of the pilot launches was never to create urgency or a Hunger Games mentality. It is not our goal to have super fast sell outs or oversells. And it is certainly never our intention to upset or frustrate anyone. The goals of the pilot were to:

1. Continue offering a huge variety of styles for our shops.

2. To continue supporting our long time vendors.

3. Do it in a way that doesn’t leave Ave with massive amounts of unsold inventory every launch day.

We’re finishing the third week of the pilot now. We really appreciate your patience as we’ve worked to optimize this process and we will continue to tweak things as we go along!

So far some things that are going well:

• Overall sales volume has improved a little bit. We think it’s a combination of the lower price points and larger variety of items.
• We’ve had a lot of positive feedback about the items being offered and just the overall success of these launches for many of our shops.
• We’ve been able to restock quite a few styles with additional quantities (either prior to launch or afterwards) to help meet demand.
• We were able to secure massive quantities of the Dear Scarlett Magic Line through preorder so that you guys could offer a super high demand product to your customers.
• Vendors have been really excited to participate and it has been helpful for many of them as well.

But of course it hasn’t been perfect…we called it a Pilot for a reason! Some of the challenges that we’ve faced so far:

• The server crash and oversell issue from Week 1 of Dear Scarlett - We’ve addressed this previously, but we haven’t really discussed the widespread impact of that day. The manpower that it took to sort out hundreds of failed orders and 1. Order restocks when possible, 2. Split shipments, 3. Roll orders into the preorder, 4. Issue refunds when necessary, 5. Notify shops, etc. had a huge downstream impact on every department within our team. Which in turn created delays in other areas for subsequent weeks.

*Thankfully this hasn’t happened again. But it did affect us in a major way so we apologize for any delays or frustrations that came as a result of that one launch.

• Delayed sample orders and oversells due to altered processing - Part of the Pilot approach means ordering more conservatively up front then going deeper in quantities that sell well in the sample buying period or at launch. This means our team is sometimes processing quantities for the same style multiple different times which has caused some warehouse hiccups and delays. We’ve also had multiple instances where packs are not clean (missing a large but has an extra medium, etc) which has created further unexpected quantity issues.

*We’re having daily meetings with our warehouse manager and leadership team to develop and refine the new processes that go along with the pilot releases. We’ve reiterated the importance of speedy shipping for sample orders and will continue to work to make sure those orders are prioritized.

• Negative quantities - As long as Comment Sold continues to have a waitlist feature there will continue to be oversells. There will always be unavoidable things with a shared inventory model (i.e. Shopify issues, manual counting errors, etc.). But the CS waitlists are the main trigger for many of these oversells that end up affecting non-CS shops as well.

*We understand that having negative quantities in Shopify is annoying and can be confusing, but it’s the primary way that we can help prevent additional waitlist oversells so we’re going to continue doing that for now.

• Inability to restock or delayed restocks - Our intention with most of these pilot products was to choose items that could easily be restocked from the vendor. But by the time we receive an item, photograph it, go through two weeks of a sample buying period and then release to customers, sometimes those additional quantities are long gone.

*We have started evaluating restocks after the first day of sample buying. This helps us grab hot sellers as quickly as possible to try and have additional quantities on hand before launch. We are continuing to evaluate the need for reordering throughout the sample buying window in an effort to tighten up the turnaround.

We’re also trying to get more accurate restock info from the vendor so we can update metadata as accurately as possible in real time!

We know many of you are wondering what to expect going forward with launches, quantities, etc. We wish that we could give you an exact roadmap of the future of Ave, but we are trying to stay flexible during these challenging times in the industry and economy.

A few things you can count on in the immediate future:

• There are a lot of things about the pilot launches that are going really well for our shops, for Ave and for our vendors, so you will continue to see those in the coming weeks (with a variety of new vendors too! Sew in Love, POL, Rae Mode, BiBi to name a few!).
• We've had a super positive response to our private label brand, One Eleven North and are working on some exciting new things to increase our offerings with that line.
• We have also been mixing in non-Pilot items (like the swim launch!) that have deeper quantities and a more curated vibe.

We hope you are seeing improvements each week as we develop our processes and learn from the data. We truly feel like this is a defining time in the industry as a whole and want to make sure we stay in a position to support you.

We really appreciate grace and patience in our community and with our team as everyone is working so hard to serve you well. We love you and hope you have a great weekend! 💛