A brand forced every handbag sale to include a matching wallet, but the strategy flopped in stores. The matching concept itself wasn't bad, just poorly executed: store teams got no clear guidance and needed flexibility on what "matching" actually meant.
We had this whole strategy of every single handbag needs to have a matching wallet. Every single one. We invested a lot of money in the inventory. Sell-throughs were not where we wanted them to be. So we were like, we don't need any matchbacks. We need all black. No more matchbacks. It didn't work. Then we go into the store and they're like, no, we don't need something for everything, but just a color, a hardware, something. And because we weren't talking to the stores, we just assumed the whole strategy failed. Because it was a bad strategy. But it was a good strategy, we just didn't do it in the right way.
