I was in charge of the thing that kept one shut for two years.
We had a decision in front of us that everybody agreed with and nobody could make.
It took about two years. When it finally went in it worked straight away, and it cost us none of the things we had been told it would cost. Nobody ever counted what the two years cost. I was in charge of the reason it took that long.
The remit
One global range. Design in one place. One line serving every market, with fewer options in total.
The business case was sound and I would write it again. Bigger buys. Better costing. Less duplication. Less waste sitting in a warehouse because three regions had each developed their own version of the same thing.
Every brand in the portfolio was pushing the same way. I was in charge of making it happen.
What it produced
Compromise. On styles, on colours, on how many options a market actually got, and on seasonality, which in hindsight should have been the obvious one.
APAC in the middle of its winter is not northern Europe in the middle of summer. California, the Basque coast, Barcelona and Russia are not one market with four postcodes. Different weather, different trends, different customers, different reasons for buying.
The regions told us. Not once. Constantly, every season, in every review.
Why nobody could propose the fix
The fix had a name internally long before it had approval. A share of the line designed and developed locally, for that market.
Here is the part that took me longer to see than it should have. Nobody was blocking it. There was no meeting where it was voted down. There was no executive who hated the idea.
What there was instead was a scorecard. We were measured on range reduction, on efficiency and on alignment. A locally designed range failed all three on paper. More options. More development. Less alignment.
So anybody putting it forward was volunteering a worse number for themselves. Including me. Especially me, because I owned the measures it would have damaged.
The decision was not held shut by a person. It was held shut by what we had agreed to count.
What nobody counted
Two years of regional business we did not do.
I can tell you exactly what the globalisation delivered, because it was reported every season. Range reduction achieved. Costing improved. Duplication removed. All of it real, all of it measured, all of it on a slide.
There is no line anywhere for the business the regions did not write while they waited. No season was flagged. No review recorded it. And because the decision was right when we finally made it, it closed clean.
That is the thing about a decision that arrives late. The cost does not land anywhere. It is not a loss, it is an absence, and businesses are not built to count absences.
Ten per cent
That is what we landed on. Ten per cent of the line available for regional design and development, with small teams in each region doing the work. Lead times came down, because development and production now sat next to the market they were serving.
Regional business started to grow.
And the global measures did not move. Not one of them.
Some of those regional styles were picked up by other regions as exclusives, which nobody had predicted, and which quietly made the global range better than it had been.
Two years of protecting a trade-off that was not a trade-off. The answer was ten per cent of the line.
Most businesses have one of these in them right now. A decision everybody agrees with, that keeps not being made, and that will probably get made eventually and work fine.
If you have one, the useful question is not who is blocking it. Usually nobody is.
The question is what it is measured against, and who would have to report a worse number in order to put it forward.
That person has already done the maths. It is why they have not said anything.
If that landed, it is worth a conversation. Thirty minutes, confidential.
Andrew