Being in Business Means Learning to Fix Your Mistakes

Me and my beautiful Squarepace website

Any business can be boiled down to a series of choices. At first it’s the founder making the choices, but eventually the choices also might belong to the investors, employees or executives. As a customer, any product we buy reaches us because the right series of choices led to a chain of events that brought the product into our hands.

But the difficult part is that, as a founder, it isn’t always clear which choices are the “right” ones. All we can do is hope that we’re making more good decisions than bad ones. Or at least that we catch the bad decisions and alter them before things get too far.

I recently came to this point in my very young business, where I realized a decision I made, based on my past experience running a business, had been an incorrect one. If you’re reading this, you probably know that House of Caswell isn’t my first business. I’ve been working on Berried Alive with my husband for many years now, and part of what I do there is keep our website up to date. A few years ago, that became websites, plural. Which has proven to be a little confusing to some customers, and is even confusing to me at times, trying to keep both of them up to date. But it seemed like our only option at the time was to have two websites, and in trying to avoid the same type of confusing situation, I feel that I’ve caused a similar one now with House of Caswell. I’m working to repair this before I even launch my first collection.

We had a beautiful website and shop built for Berried Alive by a web designer. He built our website using Wix and taught us how to use it. I had a personal website on Wordpress before, and a lot of what he taught us was familiar. These are fairly easy websites to manage and maintain, as long as you keep up with it regularly. But then Spotify started allowing artists to add a merch store to their pages, and we knew it was really important for us to sell our merchandise where people were already listening to our music, because all of our music and merchandise collections were tied in with each other.

Unfortunately, upon researching how to do this, I discovered that Spotify didn’t integrate with Wix stores, only Shopify did. At the time, we didn’t want to migrate our whole Wix website to Shopify, so I built us a very bare-bones Shopify store and painstakingly added all of our hundreds of merchandise items to it. This process took weeks of my time. Now we could have our merchandise appear next to our albums and tracks on Spotify. The downside was that I now had two stores to manage: the main Wix one and the secondary Shopify one that was only meant to be there to connect with Spotify. We never advertised the Shopify store, it was only there in case somebody came across it, usually through listening to our music on Spotify.

All this time, I’ve hated the Shopify platform. I never properly learned to use it, only learning the minimum I needed to know to connect our merchandise to our Spotify and YouTube channels and add new items as necessary. Every quarter when I need to generate sales reports so I can file our taxes, I begrudge Shopify and its too-complicated system. I recently heard it described this way, and it feels totally accurate to me: Having a shop on another platform is like having a fully functional but very basic kitchen. You can cook basic meals just fine, but nothing is fancy or difficult. Having a Shopify store is like having a deluxe kitchen with all the gadgets and tools a professional chef would use. It can be overwhelming if all you’ve ever cooked is basic meals, but it can do a lot more if you’re willing to learn to use it properly.

But I never learned to use it properly, and I’ve always disliked Shopify as a result. So when it came time to choose a platform to host my House of Caswell website, my first choice was to go easy on myself. I have used Squarespace before for a personal website, and found it very user-friendly and uncomplicated, so I decided to house my website there. I had a beautiful site designed for me and I’m really happy with it.

So here we are. My first collection launch is approaching. I’m starting to make decisions about shipping and warehousing. I’m trying to learn from Berried Alive and do things differently where necessary and keep what I know works the same. With Berried Alive, my husband and I have shipped a lot of our merchandise ourselves. For a short while we had a local warehouse shipping for us, but it didn’t work out long term. But House of Caswell is a luxury brand. I need the shipping and returns to be completely professional. I want a House of Caswell customer to feel like they’re buying clothes from a real company, not a mom-and-pop operation. That works for Berried Alive, but I know it isn’t going to work here.

I have been in discussions with 3PLs the past few weeks. They ask who hosts my website, and when I say Squarespace, I feel like they wince at me. “Shopify integrates with Meta Business Suite,” they tell me. “So you can keep track of your inventory across different platforms.” This statement hits hard. Managing inventory across Meta Business Suite with our Wix store was always a huge pain point for me. I’d always have to watch whenever we had a sale so I could adjust the inventory on the other platform manually to avoid overselling. Eventually I just let the Meta store go. I couldn’t keep up with yet another platform for our merchandise.

The 3PLs keep mentioning Loop Returns too, so I can have a seamless return process. This is another thing I know I need. Berried Alive doesn’t have the infrastructure to handle returns. Very occasionally we’ll make an exception on a case-by-case basis if we’re able to, but for the most part returns and exchanges have been beyond our capability. But I know that for House of Caswell, it’s so important for the clothes to feel and fit perfectly. If anything isn’t right for the customer, it’s crucial that we can make it right for them. I have to be able to offer returns and exchanges, so Loop Returns it is. But when I researched Loop Returns, I found out that they only support Shopify stores too.

That’s when it sunk in that I had made a mistake. I had been so determined to not make any mistakes, but I know I have now, and I am going to have to fix it before my first collection drops. It’s important to me to make sure I can provide the best possible experience for my future customers, and part of that is acknowledging that I made a bad choice and fixing it now before it becomes a problem.

I have made the decision to migrate my site to Shopify. There is some dread, of course, because I know what Shopify is like, and that’s why I avoided it in the first place. But I need to have the best possible customer experience, and this is how I’m going to achieve that. It’s going to cost me money to have my site migrated. I don’t think that learning how to do it myself is the best use of my time in this case, and I want the outcome to look professional. But I am going to put in the effort to truly learn how to use Shopify this time, with all its bells and whistles, and fully understand all the options that are available to me. I should have done some more research in the first place and saved myself time and money by just building the site in Shopify, but I thought I knew better from experience.

The important thing to keep in mind when running a business is not that every decision is going to be a right one. Sometimes, like I did here, we think we’ve made the best decision based on valid experience, and it still doesn’t turn out to be the right one. I could easily beat myself up over this error in judgment, but this is a learning experience, just like every other experience I've had, and the only way I’d truly fail is if I didn’t learn the lesson.