The Age of Contentment

Stop. Breathe. It’s okay to slow down a bit. 

As you read today’s newsletter it’s very likely that I’m trekking through mud, muck, and swamp on my latest running adventure. I found ultrarunning at a time in my life when things were spinning out of control. Running gave me an excuse to turn everything off — my phone, my brain — and get lost in the woods.

To run far you have to slow down, especially when there are inherent dangers like stumps, cypress knees (we call them “toe-catchers”), and muck that sucks the shoe right off your foot. 

Going fast is a great way to get hurt.

I see this in my experience of nearly 20 years in eCom, too. Whenever a retailer hires an outside consultant to create something new, it becomes a shortcut that adds friction later on in the lifecycle of the business. “You didn’t build the product, the team, the channel, or the strategy,” I’d tell them. “So of course, you’re having growing pains. You tried to do so much so fast that you’re struggling to keep up.”

In 2010 when we were scaling Native Remedies, we hired a fancy consulting team headed by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, the two brothers who literally wrote the book on multivariate testing. They took on the bulk of the user research, design, and testing. When they left, we soon reverted to our old ways. Why? Because they moved so fast we couldn’t keep up. We didn’t learn anything in the process.

It took two more years before we had internalized how to be a team that tests rather than a team that outsources testing.

You know who’s taking this advice right now? Consumers. We’re approaching an Age of Contentment. Most Americans (although not every American) have a lot more than they need. I personally have too many clothes, way too many sneakers, and too many items in my pantry. I quiet this discontentment by buying more and when I have too much I try to quiet the discontentment by selling it. It’s a vicious cycle.

What would happen if we collectively decided to stop buying? Economic disaster, probably. So let’s not stop, let’s just slow it down a bit.

Consumers seem to be tapping into this feeling. This week Amazon announced dismal earnings that sent the stock price into a spiral — down over 20% in after-hours trading on Wednesday. Snap and Facebook seem to be feeling the squeeze. The traditional channels for eCom growth are slowing — yeah, some of that is due to Apple privacy changes. Some of it is the macroeconomic environment. A lot of it is due to people having more “stuff” than they need.

Guidance seems to be clear: it’s time for eCommerce brands to slow down and find contentment with manageable growth. Our customers sure are. We’re not stopping, we’re not quitting, we’re not turning back; we’re just going to take it easy for a bit and enjoy the trail.

I rarely check my watch on a very long run. I don’t need to know how long I’ve been running because it’s still daylight and that means I have miles, and miles, and miles, left to go. I won’t finish until late in the evening hours, so that means I’m nowhere near the finish line. I might as well settle in for the long haul, breathe easy, slow down a bit, enjoy the run, and keep an eye out for whatever the trail may bring me.

That’s good advice for all of us right now.

— Phillip

P.S. for more on the Age of Contentment and how I’ve moved into “dirtbag mode” check out this week’s podcast, where we break down Tracksmith’s long, slow, growth and compare it with Liquid Death’s meteoric rise. Available wherever podcasts are found.