Why we all need traffic cones

*and love and kind words.

Dear Kula Diaries,

I’m standing in my office right now — which makes sense, because I use a standing desk. I’ve been trying to think about something to write — but all of my ideas seem to find themselves in a dead end.

I start writing about not overthinking things… and then the irony of trying to think about not thinking too much becomes distracting, so I stop. I save it as a draft.

Then, I think about another idea I’ve had: writing about the lunar landing. I’m not sure why, but watching the video of the lunar landing always makes me cry — and I feel like there is something about how that video makes me feel that I want to write about. But, I don’t get very far. I watch the video, and I am struck by the same sense of awe and wonder that I always feel when I watch it — I feel transfixed on a moment of time. It seems that I’ve created a memory of those first few footsteps on the moon as something that I am somehow a part of — but also, not at all, because I wasn’t even born when it happened. There is something profound about the idea that all of humanity could be so focused on something — together — even for a few minutes. I try to write about it… and, then I quit.

My mind starts to wander… to something that happened earlier this week. I think about this goof-up that I’ve made — repeatedly — over the last few years. A goof up which happened again this past week — and this feels somewhat relevant, but also weird to admit or talk about — because, some of you might (unknowingly) be a tiny part of this story. And that seals the deal for me: it’s mysterious and also somewhat unexciting… which sounds fun to write about… because most of running a business is not high glam. In fact, I haven’t really gotten to any of the high glam portions yet, if I’m being honest. And so, here’s my decision: I’m going to tell you about the goof up… and also about why it’s OK to use traffic cones. That probably doesn’t make much sense right now — but bear with me, it will.

Yes, I’ve even forced my mom to pack Kula orders.

When you start a company and ship a product, nobody ever teaches you how to do that … instead, you do your best, and you try to figure it out. Before I started Kula Cloth, I had zero experience shipping products and/or running a fulfillment center. When I first started the company, I packed orders on the floor of my guest bedroom with my husband. I was handwriting mailing addresses onto the packages and then bringing them to the post office to mail until I realized that I should buy a label printer. Once I had the printer, it wasn’t difficult, because we only had two different prints available, so it was just a matter of trying to keep track of how many items of each color that somebody had ordered. Eventually, I couldn’t handle the fulfillment anymore — so I hired a 3PL (Third Party Logistics) company to ship all of Kula’s orders. This worked really well for awhile… until it didn’t. When I started this business, the Kulas were shipped without any packaging whatsoever… because, quite honestly, I didn’t have any packaging for them. This caused a lot of headaches, and frankly, it looks horrible to have an unpackaged product arriving in an envelope — especially a hygiene product. Once we designed the compostable bags, however, it became very obvious that I needed to figure out some logistics…. quickly.

Namely: HOW DO I GET THE KULA IN THE BAG?!

Nobody tells you that your product does not magically jump into its own packaging — and so, I was in a bit of a pickle: If the products were being shipped directly to my 3PL… how would I get them in the bags? Would I have to have them shipped to me and then shipped to the 3PL once they were packaged? My manufacturer didn’t have the capacity to package them for me, and the 3PL told me that they would charge 75 cents per Kula to place them in bags. Now, if you have a $150 product, that wouldn’t have been much of an issue… but on a $20 product… it was going to really put the pinch on the profit margin. In addition, there were a lot of things I didn’t like about the 3PL: using an outside fulfillment center meant that I couldn’t write notes or personalize orders to our customers. People wrote little notes in their Kula orders all the time, and it broke my heart that I couldn’t write back to them.

When I first started to consider taking fulfillment back in house, people told me that I was nuts. They said things like, “That’s not scalable!” — which I almost believed, except that I ultimately decided that I didn’t care. People have told me a lot of things along the way — things like, ‘nobody will buy a Kula Cloth with art on it!’… and I had learned that sometimes it was OK to ignore advice… and trust my own instinct. And so, I did what everybody told me not to do: I paid thousands of dollars and had all of the Kulas shipped back to me so that we could inspect them and package them and start running our own fulfillment center.

In the very beginning of this process, the fulfillment center was in my guest bedroom… I put boxes on the floor, with a chair in the middle of them… and every single day, I’d sit in the chair like a pilot in the cockpit of a very strange plane. I’d handwrite each customer’s order on the front of their shipping label… and then pull the Kulas and place them in the package. I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention that my husband was simultaneously working 12-14 hour shifts at the railroad and coming home and spending hours packaging Kulas in their bags. Each day, I’d sit at our kitchen island and write personalized notes on every single order we packed. My wrists and hands were starting to hurt from all of the writing, but I never stopped.

Shipping the very first batch of Kulas ever!

Eventually, the stress of attempting to manage everything by myself got to be too much, and I hired some folks to help me. I showed them my archaic method of printing shipping labels and handwriting the items ordered onto the shipping label using a ridiculous acronym for each individual print. This is absolutely not the appropriate way to pack an order — but I was trying to save money and waste by not printing out packing slips. Eventually, the number of options on our website became overwhelming, and we had to revert to doing it the correct way, which involved printing a packing slip for each order (doh!).

And this, friends, is where the blooper begins. Because, unknowingly I had taught my employees to print up multiple batches of orders at once. The process for printing a batch is simple:

1. Select the orders you want to fulfill (you can print 50 max at a time).

2. Buy the shipping labels (ours are easy to print because most packages are exactly the same size).

3. Generate a .pdf with all of the labels and packing slips.

4. Print.

5. Repeat.

Unfortunately, what I didn’t realize is that when you are printing multiple batches of labels… there is the slight chance that a momentary distraction or technological glitch could take place between steps 3 & 4. Let me try and clarify what this means:

When a .pdf of the labels is generated, the online store believes that the orders have been shipped, and so it marks them as ‘fulfilled’.

However, if there was a glitch or distraction between steps 3 & 4… then you can have a rare situation in which the .pdf was generated, but the labels were not physically printed.

And to make matters worse…. if you have been instructed to print multiple batches of labels at a time, you will likely have a stack of labels sitting on your desk… which means that you are highly unlikely to notice that one batch is ‘missing’.

The first time this happened was during our Pyka Pants Launch. We were printing a lot of labels, and a few days later, we received an e-mail from a customer who said that their order hadn’t shipped yet. I looked at the tracking and it simply said, ‘Confirmed - Package Acceptance Pending’. Immediately, I blamed the post office — instead of myself. I could have sworn that we shipped out everything… and now where had it gone? Was it lost forever? We re-shipped all of the missing packages, and were baffled at where they could have gone.

Over the last few years, we were able to determine that when this happens — it means that a label was purchased for an order… a .pdf of the label was generated… but the label was never printed or applied to an order. We have always fixed the issue in 100% of times that this has happened — but my response to the blooper was always, very disappointingly, “Well, we’ll just have to be more careful.”

Sometimes just being more careful isn’t the answer. You can’t do the same thing over and over again and expect different results. And yet, for some reason, I (incorrectly) didn’t see this as a procedural issue that I needed to handle… and yet, finally, last weekend — I realized that it was. How did I realize it? Well, last week we ran a special promotion where we included a free Kula Mini in every single order over $25… and over the weekend, I happened to check on the status of a few of the orders… and I was shocked at what I saw. The dreaded yellow notification bar shouting one thing at me:

My heart sank. Somehow we had missed printing an entire batch of labels — forty nine of them to be exact. I was frustrated at myself, because I had known about this problem in our fulfillment system, and yet, I had done nothing to address the actual procedure itself.

Ok, let’s take a quick detour for a moment…

I already shared a story about my time as a driving instructor, and if there is one thing that I learned during that experience, it’s this: sometimes just being careful is not enough. Sometimes you must develop habits and procedures that help to ‘disrupt the computer’ (our brains) from their patterned way of thinking so that we don’t miss things that we unintentionally exclude. Missing a batch of shipping labels is like filling in the blank without even knowing you did it — you have no conscious idea that you made the mistake, because your brain ‘filled in’ the action of printing the labels. Have you ever done something incorrectly… but absolutely swore that you had done it right? That’s because your brain created a memory of you doing it correctly and filled in the blanks — this is particularly easily to do when it’s something that you do all the time. This is what we were doing with the shipping labels: we knew we had printed them all out… and yet, very clearly, we hadn’t. We needed to do something.

When I was a driving instructor, I learned a really shocking fact about driving: 1/10th of 1% of all driving is backing up. Just think about it for a minute… in a full day of driving, you could travel hundreds of miles, but maybe only back up for less than 100 feet total. And yet, SHOCKINGLY, 30-60% of collisions in fleet vehicles are from backing. Is this because people aren’t being careful? Absolutely not! Many of these drivers are being very careful — but, something unexpected might have happened that caused a momentary distraction… and, since there is such a lack of visibility when backing… *oops*… they back into something.

Have you ever seen utilities workers place a cone behind their truck while they are working? I used to think that this was so people could see their vehicle… but it isn’t. The reason that people put a cone behind their vehicle is because it gets them into a habit of walking behind their vehicle before they leave a location… which forces them to look behind their car for any possible obstructions before they back out. I thought about this example the other day when I was considering my mailing label conundrum and I realized how brilliantly simple it was — I needed to find my own version of a ‘traffic cone’ for my shipping labels… implement a new system… which would create a method that would help employees notice if a batch of shipping labels were missing. Afterall, if I didn’t have a ‘cone’ sitting out behind our shipping label printer… how could I possibly expect them to know if we were missing a batch?

I contemplated this new process on Sunday afternoon … as I packed up 49 orders by myself. Some of you might have placed an order for a mini Kula, and there is a very good chance that your order was in the ‘cursed bundle’ — which was fulfilled by me on my weekend. I had a choice during those few hours: I could have been annoyed at myself, or I could have felt grateful for the fact that I had 49 orders to pack. As I read the heartfelt notes in each order, it was easy to feel grateful. It was easy to look around me as I pulled items out of bins and to feel so much love for this wonderful little business that, just a few years ago, I had only dreamed was possible. It was during these few hours of packing orders, that I was reminded why I brought fulfillment back in house: because I love our customers. I love reading their notes. I love seeing their names. I love taking the time to acknowledge the existence of each and every single one of them. I might not have the ability to write poems on the back of every order anymore, but the care that I feel is still there.

On Tuesday of this past week, I talked with my employees about the missing batch of labels — and, quite honestly, I felt really bad about it. Not about them… but rather, about how I had handled the blooper from the beginning. I had let them down, because I had placed them in a situation that was nearly impossible to outsmart. When something happens repeatedly, it’s my job to dig deeper. This wasn’t a matter of somebody being careless… this was a blooper that had happened to all of us, because of how the human brain works. Our human brains had filled in the blanks about printing batches of labels — and we had missed some of them. Sure, we had always corrected our mistake… but what if there was a way to prevent the mistake from even happening? I knew what we needed — we needed a traffic cone.

You’ll be relieved to hear that I did not show up at the office with actual traffic cones. Instead, I created metaphorical cones: I devised a plan that involved sticky notes… and a metal sign with a creepy cat on it. On the metal sign, we’d write down the range of the labels that we printed that day (starting with the first label and ending with the last label that we printed). Then, we would work through our shipping labels… one batch at a time, instead of printing out multiple batches at once. Each batch’s label number range had to be written down on a sticky note prior to creating the .pdf of the labels. Then, if a momentary distraction popped up… or if the printer glitched… or if something else happened… there would be a sticky note sitting on the desk that didn’t have an associated batch of labels. A lonely sticky note without labels = we missed a batch. The sticky note became our own traffic cone — gently reminding us that we needed to check on something.

The image on our new metal sign at the office.

The new method was slower, but it was also more surefooted. I could tell, almost immediately, that we weren’t missing anything. We knew exactly where every single label was… which bin all of our orders were in… and how many we had packed every single day. It’s been six years since I started packing orders on the floor of my guest room, and I’m still figuring this out. Nobody taught me how to do this — and I don’t know if it’s the ‘right’ way or the ‘wrong’ way — but it does seem to be, at least, a start at figuring it out. It’s easy to want to quickly jump to conclusions about why something is ‘going wrong’ — and it was more difficult for me to look inward at my own response to this blooper on numerous occasions, and admit that I had dropped the ball by not having a better procedure in place that had the ability to support my employees and the, sometimes, very multi-dimensional array of tasks that they are completing on a daily basis. Of course we all lose focus. Of course we have technological glitches. But, how can we create a procedure that allows for those to arise… and still be re-routed back to the task we need to complete?

I have loved shipping orders since the very first day that I ever put a Kula Cloth in the mail. The first time that I shipped a Kula Cloth, it was a prototype Kula Cloth that I sold on Instagram. Honestly, I don’t even know how the person paid me. I just remember what it felt like to put something into the mail and to send it out to another human out there. The more and more I did this, the more and more that I realized it was a special opportunity to connect with people. When I was a kid, I had pen pals all over the world — including a girl from the Ukraine, who I kept in touch with for many years. We’d write each other long letters, sharing stories and photographs about our very different lives. Sure, I knew that shipping a pee cloth was a bit different… but wasn’t there still a way to connect with the person on the other end of the order?

Circa 2018, mailing some Kula prototypes!

A few years ago, I added an item to our website that is called ‘LOVE & KIND WORDS’. And, it really is just that: love and kind words. It’s free, and you don’t have to place an order in order to receive it… you just simply add it to your cart and go through the checkout process and include your address at the end. We write letters to every single person who has ‘purchased’ love and kind words from our website. Does this take extra time? Yes. Would somebody who was interested in scalability approve of this ‘product’? Definitely, no. Do I care? Absolutely not.

This past week I also realized that Love & Kind words is one of the most important things that we give our customers… but it’s also an important gift for me to give myself. It’s OK that I didn’t know how to ‘set up’ a fulfillment center… because, really, how could I have known? As a pre-med Latin major who worked as both a park ranger and a railroad police officer… how could I have possibly known how to set up a fulfillment center? And, to be honest, I think I’ve done a pretty amazing job of figuring this out. We’ve shipped hundreds of thousands (yes!) of Kula Cloths out into the world… with only a few tiny blips on the radar that even hint at being mistakes. In the big scheme of things, we are doing more things better than we are doing things wrong. In fact, we are doing things amazingly well. We have moved from a guest room… into another guest room… into a garage… and into a little warehouse of our own… where we ship Kula Cloths all over the world. Today, we shipped Kulas to Slovakia… and last week, we shipped Kulas to Finland and New Zealand and Australia. Isn’t that incredible?

Every order that heads away from Kula HQ is made possible because of these two amazing humans with me — they are truly a gift to me! You can read Chizuko’s blog here.

I feel good about what we are doing — and I feel good that I was able to see a place for improvement — and (finally) learn from it. But, I also recognize that these little bumps are just a part of the process of learning how to set things up when you start from scratch. For me, it’s the fun part — figuring out how to do it all, and then looking around one day at all the bins… all the Kulas… and then watching them all whisk out into the world to their new homes and new adventures. I still write notes, as much as I can… and I still write Love & Kind words when I get a chance — because I will never stop being grateful for the people who support our business. I will never be so far removed from what I’m doing that I forget what makes it possible. I can relax a little bit and trust that I’ll figure this out. I don’t have to overthink things to know what matters. And if I do? Well… that’s what traffic cones are for. I know that I can always look up at the moon and imagine those first few steps up there… and my mind will fill in the blanks… as if I were there the day that it happened. Looking up into the vastness of space — feeling that connectedness to all things — will remind me how much I care. I’ll imagine seven billion eyes and hearts all looking in the same direction and I’ll know how much, when you stop to not-over-think-about-it, we all care.

Friends, thank you all so much for being here — and for reading The Kula Diaries each week! I’m so grateful for your support — and I am wishing you each a day filled with much love and many kind words. There is nothing that brings more love into my own heart than through sharing it with others — it’s a powerful practice, and it’s something that each and every one of us can do… every day. There is always something or somebody who can benefit from a shared sense of love.