I would like to tell you the story of the first report I ever ran. We need to go back, way back to a time when it was common to ask if someone had an email address. Internet sales were quickly replacing the shopping experience of catalogs. I was working for a catalog group that recently eliminated two of their brands and was struggling to hold onto their final catalog brand. 

To put this in perspective, the entire industry changed in less than a year. There were no online communication channels for industry changes, no blogs, no marketing or manufacturing news sites, and no library of articles to google. It was a different time where companies were completely reliant on the knowledge and experiences of their employees to lead and navigate challenges.

I was a clerk in the technical design department. Designers and buyers found the hot fashions for the next year and our department handled the garment specifications and quality aspects. And there was one manufacturer that was producing one style of dress that was bolstering the sales for the company. The Dress. One season it was manufactured long and blue, and the next it was short and red. It sold out as soon as catalogs were delivered and multiple mass shipments were ordered to fill backorders. The whole company was riding the success of The Dress.

But this isn’t a fashion blog, it’s a blog about reporting. So here’s the data hook: The Dress was a huge failure and no one recognized it until it was too late.

I was walking through the warehouse to pull an item for a quality check when I saw The Dress. I saw a lot of The Dress. Two isles, three stories high were jammed packed with the seasonal red tropical colored dress. What was the top selling dress doing here? If it was a new delivery, then they would be prepared for shipment to customers, not stacked up so high that you need a rolling staircase to access them. 

The department had a sneaky suspicion. The dresses looked great in the catalog, they had breathtaking colors and looked fantastic on the models. But when a real life 3D person tried on the dress, it fit uncomfortably snug. We monitored the reasons for returns and knew customers were returning them, but we never imagined they were flowing back in those volumes. 

My manager showed me how to access the report to print out the returns from the “green screen” system. I selected numerical prompts from menu after menu, entered in the item number, and the list compiled. Pages rolled out of the printer and I spent the next hour hand counting the rows of orders. 

At the end, I pulled out the compact solar powered calculator, punched in the numbers, and wrote “78%” on the top of the stack in red pen. More than ¾ of those dresses were being returned.

As it happened, our department had a meeting with the company owner the next day. My manager invited me to come along and back the rest of the team as they presented the results. The next week, it was announced that the company was closing down. 

You are likely wondering how a functioning company could overlook such an important metric like return rates. Surely, that is due to the “good ‘ol days” of old timey, pre-internet, stone age business practices. Nope, I see the same problems in modern organizations. 

1. This company had a shared organizational goal: increase sales. As long as sales were good, then the leaders received bonuses. There was no incentive to look into other operational results. In fact, if anyone suggested changing goals to show the full financial picture, that individual would be quashed. Why would leaders want goals where their bonus isn’t guaranteed?

2. Reporting was hidden and labor intensive. I had to invest an hour to pull the return rate of a single item. If the organization wanted to have a robust suite of results, it would require a full time role that would do nothing but run reports all day. 

This is the combination of reporting and organizational alignment that I have been bringing to organizations. This blog is a place to share my data stories with the hope that you gain some wisdom. Don’t let poor reporting and poor goal structures take down your company.