A customer came into the store, picked up a Lulu Guinness bag, and then scrolled on her phone. She turned the screen towards me and showed me the same bag – available online, at a lower price – and asked if I could match it. She would buy it from me if I could.
I couldn’t.
That exchange lasted about thirty seconds. But it crystallised something that had been building for a while: the business was no longer operating in the environment it had been built for.
The economics underneath
What made that moment so clarifying was not just the price comparison. It was everything the price comparison represented.
We were competing with brand owners who had begun selling directly online. They could afford to. A brand owner signing a lease in Singapore could negotiate a ten-year term. We were on two-year leases with options to renew – which meant higher pressure to recover renovation costs faster, and turnover rent clauses that meant the landlord collected base rent plus a percentage if sales exceeded projections.
The internet had made price visible in a way it had never been before. A customer standing in our store with a phone in her hand could see exactly what she would pay if she bought the same bag from the brand’s own website, or from any other retailer stocking it. We had spent years building a curation and customer experience that justified our position. That position was now being undercut by the very brands we were representing.
The issue wasn’t pricing. It was structural position.
When the system around you changes
This didn’t happen all at once. It was a gradual erosion – and that gradualism made it harder to see clearly.
We had been in Millenia Walk since 2008, next to office towers where a lot of our customers worked. In those years, we could send an email campaign at ten in the morning and see those customers in the store by lunchtime. Citibank was located in the office tower block next to the mall. When they relocated, the traffic profile of the mall changed. Not dramatically – but perceptibly. The particular customer who had made that location work for us was no longer reliably there.
The response was logical: expand distribution. Work with department stores and independent retailers to increase the brands’ exposure in Singapore. More channels, more reach, more potential revenue.
But more channels brought new problems. Inventory had to be allocated across multiple locations. Exclusivity arrangements – essential for wholesale partners who needed a reason to carry the brand – created constraints on what we could sell where. Each new arrangement made sense individually. Collectively, they added coordination overhead that the original business had never been designed to handle.
Complexity doesn’t arrive as a crisis. It accumulates through reasonable decisions.
What it felt like from inside
More effort was going in. The relationship between effort and outcome was becoming harder to trace.
Running more promotions didn’t create stronger momentum. Adjusting pricing didn’t resolve the margin pressure – not when the cost base was what it was. The instinct was to optimise: refine the campaigns, improve the merchandising, find the lever that would make things click again. But these were all surface-level responses to something that wasn’t a surface-level problem.
The problem wasn’t the work. It was the absence of structure connecting everything together.
What I understand now
At the time, I didn’t have the language for this. The word I would have used was challenging. The retail climate is challenging. The margins are challenging. Managing multiple channels is challenging.
Challenging was a description, not a diagnosis.
The real issue was structural – and structural problems don’t respond to more effort. They respond to clarity about how the system is organised, and whether that organisation still fits the environment the business is operating in. When it doesn’t fit, more activity doesn’t solve it. It makes the friction more elaborate.
Why this pattern appears elsewhere
I’ve since seen this same dynamic in expertise-led businesses that have nothing to do with retail.
The shape is different – instead of wholesale channels and turnover rent, it’s multiple funnels, disconnected email sequences, automation layered on top of decision paths that were never clearly mapped. But the underlying experience is recognisable: things that worked before feel harder now, effort isn’t translating into clarity, and the instinct is to add more rather than examine whether the structure itself still makes sense.
The more useful question, in retail and in any service business, is not what else we can do – but whether what we have is structured clearly enough to guide the decisions we need to make.
That shift in thinking – from activity to architecture – is the foundation of how I now work with founders at Pollyanna Consulting.
This was part of the broader Sole2Sole journey.
If this pattern feels familiar, it may not be a question of doing more.