Adventures in Small Business-Land 2024 : Headwinds

Greetings form the land of Aktiv. As you hopefully know, we started this business after living in Norway in 2016-2017 and falling love with the style, functionality and durability of the Scandinavian clothing brands. Scandinavian clothing is built around the concept that "there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing," and while we feel like an outdoor store, we are actually an everyday store dedicated to clothing built for movement and layering. In Colorado, that is seen as everyday. We also see our customers pop up in places like the Pacific Northwest, upper Midwest, and New England that subscribe to the same philosophy.

We are six (!) years into this venture and still building but the various pitfalls that small business endure lead us to ask for you to share our website and story with those who are as interested in quality clothing with a clean aesthetic, made responsibly.

When a small retailer or restaurant announces they are closing the general reaction from the public is, "I didn't know they were teetering on collapse": it is likely that the owners didn't know either. At least in stark terms. The small business journey is a balancing act between seeking growth and managing debt. While you don't feel impending doom, you do see clouds gathering on the horizon always.

With this in mind we present our "State of the Business" report so our followers understand where we are. This can get a little long so please feel free to skip to various selections. It can also start to feel like a grievance list and that while that is not the goal, it seems to be all the rage, currently.

Our Clothing Selections

First, it is easy to pick great clothes from our Scandinavian partners. The quality coming out of these companies is the best in the world. Where we have improved is selecting what will connect with our customers. We are proud to offer 43 different brands within our shop with 23 only available through us. We receive fantastic feedback from both our in-person and online customers that they can find brand options that they cannot find anywhere else.

Sure, the North Face/Patagonia uniform is more prevalent than ever but we see some fatigue from customers that are sick of being a part of that parade. Since we are seen as an outdoor company we look to REI, Backcountry.com and the other big box outfitters as our competition When we visit those places what we see is selections made based on margins for the seller instead of quality for the consumer. These margins also allow them to discount the suggested retail price so the consumer feels like they are getting a substantial deal. They are not.

Another trend is clothing companies skipping retailers all together. They do this in various ways but the most common is by offering significant discounts on their home websites to customers for some of their products (loss leaders). This creates pricing that is below wholesale costs. We hope to see this trend reverse for while lower prices seem to be a positive for customers, we actually think the final result will be customers selecting items based solely on price and getting less quality and more quantity.

The Online Environment

In a word, hostile. Over the past two years the big box stores have poured money into each and every online platform. It has made it impossible to compete to get in front of the eyes of people who might be interested in our products. If you are reading this and are one of those people, we are eternally grateful. The world of social media, influencers, paid ads, etc. is a macro company game meant to distribute the lowest quality product to as many people as many times as possible. That is not our game and while the temptation is always there to run paid ads, we have ran our last one. Instead, we must earn our reputation organically and through word of mouth.

Search engine optimization (SEO for the real ones) is meant to be the great balancing force for small businesses but that has been a struggle as well. Part of that could be our domain status. When we started Aktiv we looked around and decided that Google Domains was the best option for a trustworthy place to house Aktivstyle.com...and it was for almost six years and then our account was shuffled off to Squarespace and it has been a disaster ever since. The move to Squarespace was announced after it happened and there was no opt-ing out of it. The change happened in July of 2024 and almost immediately we experienced problems...which you can read more in our section on Communication below. After three plus months of major problems we decided to move our domain services to Shopify, which also hosts our online shop.

Shopify assured us that the transfer would be seamless and if there was an interruption online it would be measured in hours. At the most, they said, it would be 48 hours but that was highly unlikely. Transferring a domain is a strange exercise. You basically start it and then you are in suspended animation for a while until someone (we think it is Loki) decides it is time for the domain to change hands. That happened on November 6th and then we were offline for 116 hours. If you visited our website during that time, it would appear that we went out of business. We tried to troubleshoot right away but the support structure at Shopify solely consists of online chats with no escalation and no phone numbers. Basically, the chat window said that they were working on it and we would get updates via email. The estimate downtime was 48 hours. We never received any updates, so to learn the status we had to go through the support chat gauntlet...we went through it 11 times and spent upwards of 40 hours trying to get it back online. In the end, it simply reappeared and only after that we finally did get an email from Shopify without an explanation and thanking us for our patience.

While our website was offline, Denver got a major snow event which is usually really good news for our shop. Sadly, twice during the storm the power to the Marketplace, supplied by another huge company- Xcel, where we are housed was lost for significant amounts of time which meant for two separate stretches of time Aktiv was completely unavailable to customers. For November, we are down over 40% in sales from last year for the month. October was down 25%. There might not be a bottom but what is very clear is that every major corporation that services our company (UPS, Xcel, Shopify, Meta, Google, Squarespace) has put customer service at the end of their list of priorities in such a way that there is no real support, you are simply on your own. 

Communication 

Connecting with our followers is the lifeblood of our online business. Unlike the big box stores where communications are handled by bots and AI, we are a company of people and when folks reach out to us in any channel, it is a person that responds. We have taken great pains to make that so but we do it as we feel it brings a human element to a buying process that has been cold and antiseptic in almost every other avenue. Stores from Target to Nordstrom are wholly understaffed and if you can find a person, they do not have any expertise to help you. The same wasteland is found online. Coupled with the lack of curation with regards to product selection, there is no appreciable knowledge when you actually get connected to a person. At Aktiv, we want to be the opposite of this and be a resource for the buying public.

On the communication front, when the domain transfer occurred from Google to Squarespace errors and omissions were made... so many that we became unverified as an email sender. In other words, the worlds inboxes thought that the email with the address aktivstyle.com didn't actually come from aktivstyle.com. That had immediate yet hard to track consequences. We send emails to our followers (roughly 18,000) and usually enjoyed higher than average open and engagement rate. Until July when our open rate plummeted to single digits. In addition, when customers would reach out to us via email with product questions, our responses were landing in their junk mail folders. We literally lost the way to communicate with our customers. The reason for this wasn't known right away but we finally concluded that Squarespace was the culprit. As stated above, we moved away from Squarespace to Shopify and out of the gates, it has not been great. Now we need to repair our sending reputation. So, if you have felt like we haven't been responsive or have simply been absent from your inbox, have a look in your junk mail folder...you may find several emails from us.

Summary

What does it all mean? We are not sure. The next five weeks will shed light on what the future will be for the company. We were actively looking at a second location but have paused that for now. The buying season has continually crept earlier and earlier in the calendar. This means that we place orders for next year before we have any clue what has connected with customers. We will meet with our makers and, since they are amazing companies, we will be wowed with what is on tap for next year but we won't be placing any orders until our sales improve. If they don't, that will probably be the sunset.