The Short End of a Long Stick - Part One

There’s a lot to love about being an entrepreneur and small business owner: you can set your own schedule, prioritize your own tasks, work on the things that matter to you, and so much more. Sometimes, however, there’s a clear difference between the little guy and all those big brands.

For the next few weeks, I’m pulling the curtain back to share a raw, behind-the-scenes look at one of the many ways in which small brands have to deal with the impossible. I have a lot of Feelings™ about this, but I thought it would be helpful to me and insightful to you to write it all out. Grab a cup of tea (or coffee or whisky - you do you, friend) and settle in for an epic tale of hope and woe. Please be kind.

A little background

Many of you have totally fallen in love with our Cypress Shorts - we love them, too, but some of you may have noticed that we’ve been sold out of our Slate Gray shorts in Size 1. In fact, we’ve been sold out since April - and this week we learned we’ll continue to be sold out for the indefinite future. 

We first designed the Cypress Shorts in 2021, right after we launched our Kickstarter campaign for the Ponderosa Pants. True to the production timeline, we knew we wanted to build our brand up nice and strong, getting into as many stores as possible so that we could serve our customers in person as well as online. We were told that our $139 price point for the Ponderosa Pants was high, so we set out to make a sub-$100 option that would still make members of the Alpine Parrot community feel great in nature. The Cypress Shorts were born relatively quickly and we absolutely loved the first prototypes. We were well on our way to launching them in 2023, and we couldn’t have been more excited!

One major goal for the shorts was to make them as easy to produce as possible: we used leftover fabric and trims (zippers and buttons) from our Ponderosa Pants and aimed to make them in the same factory, thus reducing waste and transportation costs - a sustainability and functionality win-win! We decided to change out the waistband from a built-in belt to elasticated to see how folks responded to them, so that was new, but otherwise we didn’t really need to buy any new fabric or trims at all. This should be easy - or so we thought. (Protip: never assume things will be easy, especially when you’re building a new product. You’re more likely to make small mistakes that will turn into big issues in the long term!)

The first bumps along the road

We made the first Cypress Shorts fit testing prototypes in 2022, with the expectation that we would use the exact same sizing as our Ponderosa Pants: sizes 14-30, in both Mountain and River Fit Styles. We ordered one of each size/Fit Style combination and received 18 pairs of shorts - and then we made an interesting but not totally unreasonable discovery: the elasticated waistband meant that there was no real discernible difference between the Mountain and River Fit Styles! This makes sense, if we’re being honest: having that much stretch means there’s more room for hips or waists, so if we find a middle ground we should be (mostly) okay for folks. Initial fit testing seemed to corroborate this hypothesis, so we moved forward and ordered an updated round of sizes 14-30.

Still not quite right

Armed with nine sizes, we found that our fit testers were having issues understanding what size they should be trying on - they expected that if they wear a size X Mountain or X River, they should wear a size X in the Cypress Shorts… but it didn’t quite work out that way. Moreover, folks were expecting shorts to fit differently than pants - most of our fit testers wanted baggier shorts than pants, and that wasn’t always happening across every size. So we decided to change our sizing approach entirely, going with an alphanumeric sizing strategy, e.g. 1-5 (aka 1X-5X, but the X is redundant so we dropped it). The result: our fit testers were happy! 

The sizing issue ended up taking us the better part of a year, which meant that we missed our window for the 2023 spring launch, thus pushing our Cypress Shorts launch to Spring 2024.

The best laid plans

We put in our Cypress Shorts order to our factory in the summer of 2023, with expected delivery for January 2024, so that we could ship to REI in February. Production hit a few snags, but we managed to get them delivered just in time to turn them around to REI and hit our deadline. Hurray!

We were able to fulfill our pre-orders and launched the Cypress Shorts to great fanfare in March 2024. Everything seemed to be going great until we started getting a few emails about some shorts in sizes 1 and 2: the zippers weren’t staying up 🙀 

Sidenote: there are two types of zippers on our Ponderosa Pants and Cypress Shorts - the fly zipper and the pocket zipper. For the fly, we use a locking zipper, because you don’t ever want the zipper to accidentally come undone (so embarrassing!); for the pocket, we use a non-locking zipper, because they’re easier to open and gravity won’t accidentally pull them open due to their horizontal nature. This is an industry standard that we found generally works for us and our fit testers in practice.

Upon inspection of the shorts (our factory inspected them prior to delivery and then we did another full inspection after receiving the customer notifications), we learned that some of the Cypress Shorts in sizes 1 and 2 had non-locking zippers on the fly 🙈 We were totally embarrassed, to be sure, but we also went into hyper proactive mode: we pulled all the shorts (not all of them, thank goodness!) that were faulty from our shelves, notified the customers who had already purchased the shorts in the error-prone sizes, and offered to exchange or refund anyone who had a product that wasn’t up to our standards.

We were able to go from initial customer notification to the removal of inadequate garments in under two weeks - THANK YOU those members of the community who reached out to us and let us know about the problem in the first place!

… to be continued

Any questions?

I covered a lot today, and there will be even more next week. I’m sure many of you have a LOT of questions about both scintillating parts of this journey: please send those questions in! I’ll do a full Q&A post and do my best to share the nitty gritty details (while also being respectful of the various parties involved). 

Warning: I will outright ignore any questions that involve personal attacks. Mistakes were made, lessons were learned, and tears have been shed. Every entrepreneur will tell you that things like this happen all the time - so we’re not going to point fingers or call anyone names. Thank you 💖