My First Enigma: How a 20-Year Returns Problem Ignited My Purpose
For decades, the online fashion industry simply accepted a perplexing reality: return rates soaring between 15-50%, often attributed to "poor fit." Reports would lament the massive costs – the shipping, restocking, lost sales, the drain on cash flow – all quantified in percentages that shaved precious margin from every shopping basket. Solutions emerged, indeed: personal avatars, body scanning, and detailed measurement input, to name but a few. But year after year, none proved truly effective, efficient, or scalable. They all relied on asking customers to jump through hoops, creating friction and disconnects before purchase, which ultimately resulted in a negative customer experience, all before any actual sales were made.
I observed these "solutions" with a persistent sense of perplexity. They felt like they attempted to fix a leak by constantly bailing out the water rather than finding the crack in the pipe. They were operating squarely under the Streetlight Effect, looking for answers only where the data was easiest to collect – directly from the customer at the point of perceived fit. The prevailing wisdom became: "This is just the cost of doing business online. It's an enigma we manage, not solve."
But what if it wasn't an enigma? What if this wasn't an unsolvable problem but simply one that no one had dared to look at differently?
This question became my personal challenge. To avoid following others, I added a crucial constraint: no additional disruptive steps should be taken during the end-to-end shopping experience for the customer. The solution had to be invisible to them. It must remain seamless.
This was my "Why moment."
I instinctively felt this problem could be solved, that the answer lay not in more customer input but in understanding the Opaque Black Box of the retailer's own operations. It meant discarding the standard playbooks and daring to search where others didn't. It was about trusting my curiosity to illuminate the unseen links.
I found my opportunity to work with a globally recognized American fashion, apparel, design, and retail company. I dove into a full season (12 months) of their online eCommerce shopping history, not in cleaned reports, but in its raw, unfiltered format. My approach wasn't about applying pre-conceived models; it was about thinking laterally, seeking patterns where others saw noise, and asking the fundamental "why" behind every return.
The breakthrough was profound. By dissecting their internal ecosystem—their processes, supply chain, data flows, and even their assumptions about "returns"—I proved it was possible. Without requiring a single measurement or scan from their customers before checkout, I drastically reduced returns by 48 per cent, improved their margins, and significantly enhanced customer satisfaction. It was a tangible validation that the most persistent problems often yield to a new perspective and a willingness to challenge the "comfortable normal".
This initial quest, born from a deep personal curiosity, laid the foundational principles of what would become the Organisational CT Scan and my approach to illuminating the invisible. It taught me that true value is found not in managing symptoms but in courageously diagnosing and transforming the unseen operational realities that shape a customer's experience.
The profound results of that very first enigma became a powerful testament to this approach. For the detailed insights and the quantifiable impact of how we achieved those breakthroughs, explore the full case study here:
