This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Welcome, welcome. Welcome to Failure Friday. This is a collection of short stories all about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure. It is part of Side Hustle School, my daily podcast. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to episode 1672.
If I'm not mistaken, we've been doing this every single day since January 1, 2017. An unbroken streak of stories, tips, case studies, actionable information you can use in your pursuit of going from idea to income. It's all about creating extra money without quitting your job, using the skills you have, etc. Failure Friday has become one of our most popular segments that we do. And this particular story that you're going to hear today, I have to say I think it's one of our best yet. So these stories are going to vary, but often
they begin with an idea, what the person thought would happen, and then what really happened. And of course, what they learned. So I just want to get out of the way today because today's short story is so good. It features Aaron Spiebak from Toronto, Canada. We told the successful journey of his weighted blanket business on episode 885. But disaster struck.
And when I say disaster, in this case, I mean total disaster. You're going to hear it for yourself here. So I'm going to hand the mic to Aaron for this incredible story. And I will come back at the end with a few brief comments. Hey, my name is Aaron Spiebak, and I'm the co founder of hush blankets. And we make the
world's largest variety of premium weighted blankets along with a bunch of other sleep products. In 2018, we prepared for our largest Christmas ever. All year long, we were just talking about Christmas and preparing for this moment because we knew we had a very giftable product that primarily worked really well in the winter. So traditionally, we gave ourselves 60 to 75 days to prepare our inventory and organize our warehousing. But we waited until September thinking, hmm, worst case, we'll get our stuff by end of November, giving us ourselves at least 90 days. Turns out we were significantly wrong. We didn't receive
our stuff until January. No matter what we could have done, we didn't take in something called golden week, which is something you can apparently Google. And golden week is essentially this one week that everyone in the supply chain and logistics industry knows as if you don't get your stuff out by golden week, which is usually the end of September, early October, then the chances that your stuff arrives in your warehouse in time for Christmas is highly unlikely due to a severe amount of congestion and the inability to just get stuff on boats. So all month long, so September, October, November, we had guaranteed Christmas delivery because our projections stated that our stuff would arrive in time. Fast forward to December 26th, we had our tail between our legs because all seven of our containers were at a port and not in our warehouse. And unfortunately for us, we had
to refund 17,000 orders to 1500 different customers and let them know that their predominant gift because a hush blanket will sell for two over $200. So for most families, this was the main gift under the tree and we fell short and 15,000 people did not have their Christmas gift, which we promised would arrive on time simply because we did not know that we should have ordered a month or two in advance. Our stuff only arrived in January and people got their stuff up to two months after Christmas. It was a horrible lesson to learn, but a very valuable lesson to learn because in 2019, 2020, and as we prepare for 2021, we are ordering in June, July, and August way, way in advance, preparing our logistics way in advance because of how harsh the backlash and the feeling was to not deliver Christmas gifts for so many different customers. There is no light at the end of this story. The light was simply
a harsh lesson learned is to always give yourself extra time to not promise and guarantee things that you cannot actually guarantee and to learn a lesson and act on it. Many of those customers that did not get their stuff delivered, we were able to over deliver for and made them custom t-shirts and different types of merch to go along with their order. And in some cases we've upgraded many of them to more premium versions of the products that they ordered just to make up for the delay, but a lesson that we will never ever forget because around those sensitive times of years, Christmas and Thanksgiving and birthdays and Memorial Day and Valentine's Day, you want to deliver on time and who doesn't want to make their customer happy. And that was one of our biggest to date failures that we continue to learn from every single day. Wasn't that an incredible story? I mean, what a challenge. Thank you so much, Aaron, for
sharing that so openly and honestly. I mean, 17,000 orders. Can you imagine having to refund 17,000 orders? Well, it's a good thing. The theme of failure Friday is never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat because Aaron and hush blankets are still going strong.
They have definitely learned several lessons there. If you're wondering more about golden week, by the way, I always thought of golden week as being associated with Japan. And the golden week in Japan happens earlier in the year. I think it's March or April, but I did some Googling myself. And in China, there are actually three different golden weeks.
There's one that starts around the Chinese New Year. There's one around Labor Day, which is the 1st of May. And then there is the National Day Golden Week, which I assume is the one that affected Aaron so much begins late September, early October. So yeah, I guess the bonus lesson there is a plan for golden week if you are involved in overseas manufacturing, because it sounds like it's going to affect you. At least if you have containers filled with weighted blankets. Check out our insight at hush blankets.com hush blankets.com or
follow them on Instagram or Twitter at hush blankets. Sounds like they have a pretty great product and also incredible dedication to customer service, at least as long as you didn't order in the fall of 2018. But even then it sounds like they had a good dedication to doing what they could to make it right. Okay, if you have a question, if you have an update for us about your sidehustleschool.com slash questions. Thank you for joining me today. I hope you'll subscribe and follow come back tomorrow for more. My
name is Chris Guillebeau. This is side hustle school. From the onward project
