A lot has happened since Papu's relaunch. It all started back in the autumn, when Jussi, Anna and I began talking about buying the Papu brand and carrying on the business. Papu Design Oy had gone bankrupt, and the bankruptcy estate was in charge of whatever was left of the brand. First, though, we had to discuss why Papu should be rescued at all – and there turned out to be plenty of good reasons. Papu is an interesting, well-known brand with lots of loyal friends who have missed it. It's known as a responsible Finnish clothing brand that wants to make dressing fun. This also led to a discussion about whether Papu had perhaps lost a bit of that fun towards the end.
Then we had to discuss whether Papu could be turned into a profitable business. That meant some Excel gymnastics on what costs the business would generate and what kind of sales would be needed to cover them. Thirdly, we discussed whether there were investors out there brave enough to put their money into a Finnish clothing brand when fashion labels are going bust left, right and centre. In the end, every plan is a good one until you actually start doing it, and you just have to accept that everything involves risk – and when the risk is reasonable, you can take it. And so it was decided that Papu would live on.
Negotiations with the bankruptcy estate
After that came a surprisingly long negotiation with the bankruptcy estate, which delayed everything and also meant we missed the Christmas sales. As a result, the knitwear (find it here) and beanies (find them here) went on sale hopelessly late, as the spring sunshine was already stretching its limbs.
On the other hand, when the online store finally opened, the response was fantastic. The selection wasn't exactly huge, but sales exceeded expectations, and the first day's sales alone covered a third of the entire sales budget for February. Of course, sales then settled down, and not every day since has been a sales triumph, but February beat its target.
The bestsellers at launch, by the way, were the Giant dress and sweatshirt in the Sense print (find them here) and the Chunky Turtle knits (find them here).
Shipping delays
Right now we've been sweating because some shipments have been taking far too long. Our agreement with our warehousing and logistics partner is that 97% of orders are dispatched within 2 days, and we've fallen well short of that. It turned out that our partner had been updating its warehouse management system, which caused the delays. This is obviously unfortunate, because we weren't able to warn customers that shipments were delayed – instead, we found ourselves investigating after the damage was already done. At the time of writing, the backlog has been cleared, but we're still looking into what happened to one domestic order and the delays to international orders.
Processing returns has also been delayed for the same reason, but I've just finished processing all the returns we know of, meaning customers have now been refunded for their returned orders. There was another technical problem on top of that, but we got around it by making bank transfers left, right and centre. Computers do make life difficult sometimes.
The international online store
Now that we're on a roll with the blunders, let me tell you what happened with the international online store, papudesign.com – and here (too), the culprit is 100% yours truly. The international store was finished this week, and, bursting with excitement, we sent a message to our English-language newsletter subscribers announcing that the .com store was now open. That evening, Anna messaged me asking whether I'd noticed that the international store's front page was showing some sample products, when it should have been showing the Giant Grid products on pre-order. I went to check straight away and found that, sure enough, the products had vanished from the front page – the very products that were also the top story in the newsletter we'd just sent. After a bit of digging, I discovered that the international store had an app switched on that automatically removed products with zero stock from the range. Pre-order products like these have zero stock until they arrive at the warehouse, so the app had decided to take them off sale altogether. We got the products back on sale quickly, but the newsletter had already missed its mark. On top of that, it turned out that shipping only worked to a small number of EU countries. There was nothing for it but to spend a working day fixing the problem. The next day we sent out a new newsletter apologising for the blunder and letting everyone know that these problems had now been fixed. That same evening, orders came in from Canada, Serbia and Iceland, among others.
At least one hit 🙂
To finish, I have to share at least one success. Last Friday week, we put the Giant Grid knits on pre-order, and it was a huge success. (You'll find the Giant Grid products here) Over the weekend we sold almost 50 pre-order items, which at this stage is big sales for us from just two products. Thank you for that!
This was a slightly different blog post this time.
-Tuomo, Papu's CEO
P.S. This post was originally published in our newsletter at the beginning of March.
