Job 11: 11 Honoré
I've always viewed "company loyalty" as something that corporations want to expect of their employees while offering nothing in return, so have taken the point of view that keeping eyes and ears open for new opportunities was always in my best interest. With that in mind, there was a period of time while I was working at Hulu where I was casually interviewing at other companies as I found out about job openings through recruiters or other contacts. I even got a couple of interesting offers, and passed on several, preferring to stay at Hulu. As the Walt Disney Corporation started to force its grubby corporate hands into remaking Hulu in its own image, a recruiter contacted me about an opportunity to run technology for a small eCommerce startup located in West Hollywood.
I met with the CEO and founder of the company, and almost immediately decided that I wanted to work with this person. He was passionate and full of energy and brought a level of exuberance to his work that I hadn't experienced up to this point in my career. His company intended to be a luxury fashion brand, and the technology solution he wanted an engineering team to build was to help provide more accurate fit and sizing recommendations to plus-size customers. I didn't know anything serious about fashion design or clothing, but I liked the idea of a new challenge, and he liked that I had at least watched Project Runway on TV so we came to an agreement that the eleventh job of my career would be to head the technology department at 11 Honoré. (Until writing this, I didn't realize the coincidence of those numbers.
The first office location was a small retail location on Melrose Avenue. There were about ten people crammed into what, if I remember correctly, used to be a small hair salon. We didn't have dedicated parking, so had to take semi-frequent breaks throughout the day to move cars around the neighborhood so we didn't get parking tickets. While I finally had the title of Vice President, with only two engineers on the team, there wasn't a lot of management to do, so this job also let me get back do doing more software development work than I had done since my job at Google. Frontend software development had changed a lot since 2011, so I found myself largely dependent on engineers with much less experience than I had helping me get up to speed on modern CSS and HTML. (Take a look around at this website; I'm still not much of an expert.)
After familiarizing myself with the state of the business, I started trying to put together some plans on how to make progress towards the end goal of having software that could make better size recommendations for our customers. I had read Eric Ries's book The Lean Startup, and knew that we didn't want to build out a full-fledged system; we just wanted something to test out the theory. Our in-house stylist and designer (who now has her own line of surfwear) had models try on every piece of clothing we sold to measure for fit, and we also had data of what items customers had returned due to being too large or too small, so our first iteration was to identify those clothes in our Shopify catalogue, and put up a small message in the size dropdown letting our customers to choose either a size larger or smaller than they would normally choose.
We ran this as a typical A/B test, with 50% of customers getting the standard size selection drop down and 50% getting the message to choose a size up or down. (We didn't have a large customer base to begin with, so figured we had to sample a large subset to get statistically significant data.) The data was not enouraging. Conversion rates for the experimental treatment were clearly lower than the default experience leading us to wonder if we were on the right track at all. Some customer feedback confirmed that customers didn't want a computer telling them what size clothing to buy, even if we worded this as a recommendation from our designer.
So we kind of pressed pause on the size recommendation idea, and worked on a variety of other redesigns and tweaks to the website. We enabled data integrations to improve advertising recommendations via Facebook and Instagram, worked on different promotions and sales to increase interest, and put together our own fashion show to open New York Fashion Week. (I was able to attend, which is not something I was ever expecting when I embarked on a career in software development, but was definitely one of the more memorable experiences in my career.)
Despite the work we put into social media and other marketing, where we found the most success with the business tended to be more offline. We ended up hiring a small sales team who would hold pop-up events in cities around the country, and worked directly with some individuals directly. (Many items on our website were upwards of $1,000, with the most expensive dresses above $5,000.) This posed a challenge for managing inventory, because at any given time, we might have a significant portion of our inventory outside of our warehouse, either at an event, or on loan to a customer to try on before purchase. We decided to build our own lightweight inventory tracking system to help us keep track of where things were, with the idea that, a slower delivery time.
While the collective efforts of our marketing and engineering teams were growing the business, it wasn't happening quickly enough to justify the ongoing costs of all of us, especially me. We had hired one more engineer during my time there, but the time came that I had to lay off myself and one other engineer on the team. (I wasn't given the option to stay on, so laying myself off was not some noble sacrifice on my part.) Choosing which other engineer to lay off sucked. I really enjoyed working with all of them, and they were also all really great at the job. (My final choice was mostly arbitrary; I could have flipped a coin, but felt it necessary for me to make a choice. I'm still not comfortable with the choice I made, but I also know I wouldn't have liked any of them.)
1: Lessons I'm Learning
Prior to 11 Honoré, all my experience as a manager was in fairly large organizations. My time was spent meeting with other teams, making long-term plans, writing performance reviews, and interviewing. There was none of that at 11 Honoré. We collaborated with other teams — the marketing team sat in the same room as engineering — but we didn't have to schedule meetings with long agendas and pages of action items. We just got things done. Instead of dealing with bureaucracy of a large company, I got to spend time with the engineers, get back to writing code, and focus on getting things done as best as we could.
Throughout my career, I have made efforts not to get too isolated in the Engineering department, but going back to a company as small as this really brought home that the software development team is only ever one piece of a complex puzzle. I got to see much more closely how marketing teams use advertising analytics to bring buying customers to a site, all of the things a design team takes into account when creating a beautiful and functional website, went to our new warehouse partner to see how orders would be fulfilled and shipped to customers, and also learned how we worked with fashion designers to adapt their designs for our customers, and with our buying team to understand a little more how we chose which items to feature. As an engineer, it is very easy to stay focused on our terminal windows and the bits and bytes of a business, but I have never regretted taking time to get out of my lane and try to understand the rest of a company. (And, as with many of these "Lessons I'm Learning" sections I write, I realize that I need to do more of that where I am.)