Publish fewer availability promises, and keep all of them
Retailers show store stock on every product page because the data exists. A figure the store cannot stand behind is not a service to the customer but a promise someone else will break, so the claim should be rationed and earned back store by store.
Every message on a product page is a promise made on behalf of someone in a store, a stockroom or a workshop, so I ask them before we publish it.
Revenue, year to January 2026
C$742M
31 per cent online, 33 per cent company stores, 36 per cent independent shops
Product colleagues led
148
Product, design, content and localisation, personalisation and accessibility
Click-and-collect cancellations, 2025–26
2.4%
Down from 11.2 per cent in 2021 after rationing in-stock claims
A retailer earns the right to sell online by promising only what its stores, its repair benches and its cancel button will actually do.
I am the chief product officer of Sablemere Outdoor Inc., a fictional Vancouver outdoor-clothing company founded in 1958 as a sailmaker's rainwear workshop. We sold C$742 million of jackets, layers, footwear and packs in the year to January 2026: 31 per cent online, 33 per cent through 41 stores of our own in Canada and the United States, and 36 per cent through independent outdoor and ski shops. My team of 148 owns the products customers use to buy from us, collect from us, book a repair with us and sell their used gear back to us, in English and in French.
I came to digital product the long way round. I began as an industrial engineer in a catalogue company's returns centre in Winnipeg, built warehouse systems for a sporting-goods distributor, ran product for a Toronto department store's first online store and spent seven years in Montréal building store-inventory software for other retailers. Each job taught me the same lesson from a different side: whatever a screen tells a customer is a commitment that somebody else, usually a store associate or a warehouse picker, has to honour.
That is why the decisions I am best known for at Sablemere made our numbers smaller before they made them honest. We removed in-stock claims from product pages where our store counts could not support them, let members of our paid care programme cancel online in two steps, and held a new checkout through a holiday season until blind customers could complete it. Each one cost revenue in the year we made it. Each one is now part of how the company plans.
Collection orders customers can rely on
Click-and-collect cancellations fell from 11.2 per cent of orders in 2021 to 2.4 per cent in 2025–26 after we showed store availability only where count accuracy passed 95 per cent. The rule cost an estimated C$9.8 million of orders in its first year; collection has since grown from 17 to 24 per cent of online orders.
A resale catalogue written once in two languages
A grading vocabulary of five condition grades and 64 defect and repair codes, each written in English and French, let us launch resale across Canada, Québec included, in July 2023. We resold 38,000 items for C$4.5 million in 2025–26, with returns of 7.8 per cent against 16.5 per cent for new clothing bought online.
A membership people chose
When we removed a pre-ticked box at checkout and put cancellation online, paid members fell from 212,000 to 151,000 and we lost about C$3 million a year of fees. Card disputes fell from 1,900 a year to 140, and membership has recovered to 166,000 without the box.
A checkout every tester could finish
We held our new checkout from September 2024 to January 2025 to fix 44 of 47 accessibility failures, at a cost of C$2.1 million in parallel running. In moderated sessions afterwards, 22 of 24 disabled testers completed a purchase, against 9 before the fixes.
Current focus
I am preparing our resale service for the United States, where we will grade and sell used gear through our Seattle and Portland stores from 2027. Alongside it, I am rebuilding our fit guidance so that the reason a customer gives for a return changes the product page within a week rather than a season.
Conversations I welcome
I intend to finish the resale expansion before considering an executive move, and would talk with search partners about a chief product or chief digital role from the second half of 2027. Sooner than that, with my board's consent, I would join one independent board of a Canadian consumer business, giving about twenty-five days a year. I also accept a few speaking invitations on accessibility and honest product design.
Beyond the page
The record behind the perspective.
In the boardroom
Tellamore Testing Co-operativeVolunteer director of a worker co-operative of disabled accessibility testers · 2023–present
Formation
Bachelor of Applied Science in Industrial EngineeringEllesward University · 2000
Graduate Diploma in Human–Computer Interaction, part-timeCallowford Institute of Design · 2011
Amelia's papers tell the board who pays when a decision goes wrong, including people who never appear in a sales report. When she proposed letting members cancel online, the revenue we would lose was in her first paragraph, not her appendix. Directors learn to trust a product leader who puts the cost first.
Rosalind AbernathyFictional board chair, Sablemere Outdoor Inc.The full record ↗
Contact
I intend to finish the resale expansion before considering an executive move, and would talk with search partners about a chief product or chief digital role from the second half of 2027. Sooner than that, with my board's consent, I would join one independent board of a Canadian consumer business, giving about twenty-five days a year. I also accept a few speaking invitations on accessibility and honest product design.
