How I Lost $50k In One Month

In 2019, I set up a Pinterest account for my online jewelry business, Luna & Jade. I didn’t do much with it besides sporadically post Pins while crossing my fingers I was sending traffic to my website. Spoiler: without any type of strategy, I wasn’t.

After 2 years of no Pinterest game plan, I hired someone to revamp my boards and organize the cluster of Pins I had slowly collected. With more consistency toward the goal of getting eyes on my website, I started to see a slight uptick in traffic.

Something to remember when dealing with Pinterest is you’re playing the long game focusing on evergreen content, which is search-optimized content that is continually relevant over a long period of time. Somewhere between 2021 and 2023, I started working with my photographer + branding expert. She spent a lot of time playing around with my Pinterest strategy. By 2023, we had 100’s (probably closer to 1000’s) of branding pictures we were Pinning to multiple boards multiple times a day via TailWind, a very useful social tool which allows you to schedule pins throughout the month, so you don’t have to post in real time.

In late 2023, I started seeing products moving quicker than normal. I didn’t think too much of at the time until the orders started coming faster and more consistently. One product in particular, our Charm Bracelet, was selling so quickly I was having a hard time keeping inventory up. In October 2023, this product was selling so fast I ordered $1000’s of inventory in preparation for the upcoming holiday season. This was more inventory for ONE item than I had ever carried, and I felt a little sick to my stomach thinking I would never sell it all and be sitting on for months to come.

October quickly transitioned into November and I was in full-blow panic mode. Not only did I use my existing inventory, but was ordering $100’s of materials a day just to keep up with demand. Then came the Black Friday – Cyber Monday weekend. This time honestly feels like a total blur because it was the most chaotic time I’ve ever had, and hopefully ever will have in my business. From Black Friday through Sunday, I sold so many items I was in an inventory hole, which means I had “committed” more items than I had on hand. Example: I ran a report on Shopify and had committed (meaning this many were ordered) 683 pearl charms and only had 52 on hand. You read that correctly; I was 631 pearls SHORT. They didn’t exist in my studio and were already PAID FOR by excited customers anxiously awaiting their orders.

One might think, “This was all YOUR fault! Why didn’t you have inventory up to date and tracked correctly?” I didn’t because I’d never dealt with this type of order volume. I’d have very busy seasons, but nothing I couldn’t keep up with. To add fuel to the fire, this was not only the busiest time of the year for small businesses like me, but also for suppliers. When I tried to order more supplies, they were OUT OF STOCK. I spent hours scouring new suppliers and ordering anything I could get my hands on while paying outrageous next-day shipping fees.

At midnight the night before Cyber Monday, I couldn’t sleep. I checked my email and saw a slew of new orders and knew I had to do something because I physically couldn’t fulfill them. I even had friends + family helping package orders daily. It wasn’t enough. I went into my office and sold out all inventory on this product, meaning I took all inventory levels down to zero, so customers could still see the product online, but couldn’t order it. I then found a restock notification app and spent the next three hours setting it up and attaching it to my website. This allowed customers to sign-up for an email notification when I received my new products and inventory levels were adjusted in the system. When I woke up the next morning, there were OVER 800 sign-ups. 800 people that would have potentially purchased the item from the time I shut it down to the time I set-up the restock app. 800!

Let’s assume the average order for a charm bracelet with 5 charms (many would get more) is $85. $85 x 800 = $68,000. Making another assumption that not every sign-up would have been an order, I conservatively estimated that I lost out in $50k in sales by not being prepared. $50k because I didn’t think it would happen to me.

I worked around the clock for days to get orders out in time. I had to put an out of office message on my email with a blanket statement saying we are doing the best we could, so I didn’t have to answer emails about order statuses. Once the chaos ended, I was completely burnt out. I took one month off from offering the charm bracelets on my website while I worked on a better inventory system. I re-dropped the item on NYE. I did get more orders, but when I shut down the item initially, I shut down the frenzy and it never picked up the same way again.

If you learn one thing from this post, it’s this: PREPARE FOR WHAT YOU PRAY FOR. Don’t make the same mindset mistake I did. It’s a very hard, very expensive lesson to learn. If you are praying for great success in whatever business dream you’re dreaming, start preparing today. Prepare for what you WANT, no matter how out of reach it may feel right now.

Always cheering for you.

If this blog helped, make sure to follow @xomandyscott for more small business tips, advice, and encouragement along your journey. 🖤