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good evenin' merrymakers 🛍️🍀🌀✨
switching things up with an evening send on a topic thats very top of my mind.
this summer i’m revisiting cities that i lived in during my 20s which were particularly formative for my career, community, hobbies, & life. walking around these cities & reconnecting with people who still live there has reminded me of who i was when i lived there & what i was striving for.
the more i think about all the incredible things that have happened since then, the less convinced i am that my life was the product of a master plan.
which is very inconvenient…
bc i really love a plan.
proven by the fact that i’m in the minority when i share how much i love wedding plannig.
but i digress, when i look back to my move to sf or to nyc. the friends i made. the job offers i turned down. the places i traveled.
only some of those i can trace backward & call smart. the rest have a more honest label:
lucky.
this is also very top of mind as i just finished watching the apple tv series lucky, talking with a former roomie about startup luck, & reading ina garten’s book “be ready when luck happens.”
one thing i know for sure is that luck is often easier to spot when things go wrong. bad timing. bad market. bad boss. bad economy. bad relationship. bad habit.
when things go right, we get very talented at taking credit.
i’ve realized that this very much the case inside retail brands too, especially when they talk specific stores.
in today’s letter, you'll learn:
→ why retailers are plagued by lucky store syndrome
→ how much is actually luck vs skill
→ ways luck lies
→ what to do ask luck strikes
lucky store syndrome
remember lucky girl syndrome?
back in december 2022 (around the time i decided to start this newsie!), a creator named posted a video about how she just expects great things to happen. by january the whole app is repeating the mantra:
i'm so lucky, everything just works out for me.
almost four years later, the quote is still everywhere and baked into many a manifestation process. the girls love the pitch that luck is a mindset.
say you're lucky,
become lucky,
collect the results & credit your mindset.
retail has its own version of lucky girl syndrome.
when something goes wrong, retailers are pretty comfortable blaming bad luck. when something goes right, suddenly it was all strategy.
retailers get lucky, then sneakily file it under skill.
i’m naming this lucky store syndrome.
retail’s tendency to mistake everything that went right for a store for something the store did right.
we over-credit what the retailer controlled and under-credit everything the store inherited by chance.
the block. the weather. the neighbors. the trend. the customer who posted. the celebrity who wandered in. the restaurant that opened next door. the road that, blessedly, avoided construction projects for eighteen months.
how much of this is actually skill?
a 2023 paper analyzed 183 interviews from how i built this, where guy raz asks founders to rate their own success on a scale of 1 (all luck) to 5 (all skill).
the average answer came in at 3.09.
almost dead center.
so the founder consensus was i worked extremely hard, i made good calls, & some shit happened. skill is real. good operators beat bad ones, repeatedly, over years.
but a single break can bend an entire trajectory.
so success probably isn't skill or luck.
it's closer to:
skill × exposure × luck × what you do when it shows up
stores have coordinates
an ecommerce business fights algorithms, platforms, competitors & culture.
a store fights all of that, plus an exact spot on earth.
sign a lease & your p&l gets entangled with sidewalks, weather, parking, train stations, construction, tourism, office occupancy, neighboring tenants & the general fate of a few city blocks.
excellent team. excellent assortment. excellent store.
then the city starts a major construction project in front of your door & now no one can even see you store from the street.
or the reverse…
a perfectly ordinary block, perfectly ordinary lease.
then the best restaurant in town opens next door.
congratulations on your strategy.
weather is the cleanest proof of this i've found.
the san francisco fed tracked daily sales across 100+ stores of a national retailer. moderately bad weather cost roughly 25% of a normal day's sales. really bad weather, closer to 40%.
& those sales didn't move online or come back on the next sunny tuesday.
they evaporated.
what this means:
sometimes your comp was down because your strategy was wrong.
sometimes your comp was down because your assortment sucked.
& sometimes your comp was down because it snowed.
the p&l reports three misses. reality reports three completely different stories. ones that i desperately tried to track to understand in my fp&a days.
which is why i've gotten suspicious whenever someone tells me about their best store.
best according to what?
how much of that performance belongs to the retailer & how much belongs to the block?
the “lucky” looking back
once you start looking, brand histories are full of these moments.
shake shack started as a hot dog cart in madison square park, part of an art & revitalization project. it was meant to be a one-off.
people loved it.
the cart became a kiosk.
the kiosk became a shack.
the shack became hundreds of shack.
the luck = demand showed up in a format nobody built to scale.
the skill = danny meyer's team recognized what they'd found & built an operating system around it, turning a one-off hot dog cart born from a fine-dining restaurant into a global public company with hundreds of locations
hill house home got a different flavor of it.
the nap dress already existed before 2020. then the entire world was forced to stay home & solve a newly urgent problem: what can i wear that feels like pajamas but reads as employed on zoom?
hill house happened to own an almost comically well-timed product when the pandemic arrived & it had already built the customer relationships & supplier network to move on it.
then there's stanley.
a customer's car burned. her stanley survived, still holding ice. she posted the video. roughly 80 million views later, stanley's president answered with a video of his own, offering her replacement cups &, casually, a new car.
stanley didn't set the fire or shoot the video. stanley was just extremely good at being lucky. leadership saw the moment, had permission to act & amplified it before the internet moved on.
luck is the event.
skill is what happens next.
can you increase luck?
not exactly.
but you can widen what some people call your luck surface area.
this is the number & quality of chances you create to run into a positive surprise, multiplied by your ability to notice it, act on it & keep the value.
you can't schedule serendipity for thursday at 2.
you can build more doors for it to walk through. i happen to live with some who is extremely talented at this & inspires me to do it more often.
for stores, that looks like signing leases inside districts with many independent reasons to visit, rather than betting on one traffic generator.
giving store teams permission to experiment without an approval chain.
pop-ups. odd collaborations. assortment room for ideas that haven't survived 17 excel models. physical moments people photograph, bring a friend to, describe to someone at dinner. listening closely enough to catch customers using your product in ways you never designed.
& the least obvious, but most important one:
keeping enough slack to move.
a perfectly optimized business is surprisingly bad at getting lucky.
when every dollar has a job, every unit has a home, every hour has a task & every decision needs 6 approvals, nothing is left over for surprise.
the creator walks in. the celebrity wears it. the weird local activation draws a crowd. something starts spreading.
& while you schedule a meeting to discuss how to respond to it,
the moment ***poof *** is gone.
luck also lies
peloton is the cleanest recent example.
the company was already well positioned in early 2020. then gyms closed & home fitness demand exploded. fiscal q1 2021 revenue rose 232% year over year.
that was not a new law of consumer behavior.
as the pandemic receded, demand normalized hard. the tailwind was real. the business was real.
confusing the two got very expensive.
which points at the actual danger of lucky store syndrome. the mistake isn't celebrating the win. the mistake is learning the wrong lesson from it.
a store crushes plan, so you replicate its merchandising.
maybe you just replicated good weather.
a location outperforms, so you update the site selection model.
maybe the neighborhood shifted in a way no model saw coming.
a product explodes, so you buy 10x.
maybe you bought into a moment.
none of this makes strategy meaningless.
the opposite.
skill matters. taste matters. execution matters.
what to do with luck?
i share this not to discourage, but to encourage a more honest assessment of performance in stores & in life.
i think one of the best things you can do is get better at identifying luck. we have so many biases that work against us.
to do this, the next time you have a “win,” answer these 3 questions honestly:
what did we do?
what happened to us?
which part of this will happen again?
you can't control your luck.
you can build more places for it to land, then get unusually good at catching it when it does knock on your front door.
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