In Production collection - the pros and cons

This Friday, all being well, we are launching two new Pants and two new Working Week packs - Beautiful Biscotti and a new Wonderful White lace. Both are Aimee shorts.

They've not been in our In Production collection and I wanted to talk a bit about why.

Our In Production collection was meant to do two things. It was meant to offer you the chance to order your pants before launch with a few ££ off and it was meant to tell us exactly what we needed to make to make you happy. That way we hoped to combine the best bits of 'making to order' with 'not having to rethread six sewing machines just to make one pair of pants'

What we hadn't banked on was that people would find Pants that were in the 'In Production' collection on our webshop, but not realise how they had got to that page. They'd order, not realising that the Pants were, in effect Pants Futures - they didn't exist yet. And then a week or so later we'd get emails asking where the pants were.

It was meant to make things easier and better but what it seemed to do was make people sad. Some people loved it - which is great. But it seemed more people were confused by it and that's not what we want.

We thought about various ways of rearranging the website - could we just add these Pants to the In Production collection and not, say, the Aimee collection so they could only be found on that actual page? Well yes - but it would still be possible to search the site, or follow a link that someone shared, and not know that. And end up unhappy.

We're a tiny, tiny business and we'd rather spend our time doing things we know work thank fixing things that go wrong. So, for the time being, we're not going to use our In Production collection. Our launch offers, whenever they come, will run for a whole weekend - from 00.01 on a Friday to 23.59 on the Sunday so there is still a fair chunk of time to get the Pants at launch pricing. And we'll let you know a week in advance in our weekly newsletter that a launch is coming so you can be ready to bag a bargain.

We hope that works for you - do let us know what you think in the comments.