The rules I build retail products around

I treat every availability message on a product page as a promise made on behalf of a store. At Sablemere we show 'in stock at your store' only where cycle counts for that store and product category have been at least 95 per cent accurate over the previous eight weeks and at least three units are recorded; otherwise the page offers delivery to the store in three to five days or invites the customer to call. I built the confidence scoring behind that rule at Brisevent and adapted it here with our chief operating officer, who owns the stores and their counts. Since 2023 our outerwear and footwear have carried RFID tags, which lifted record accuracy in those categories to 98 per cent. Store managers' scorecards include count accuracy, and stores, supply chain and product review the rule together each quarter, so no single team can loosen it to rescue a weak sales month.

Most retailers run returns, repairs and resale as three cost centres with three web pages. We treat them as one product: the life of an item after its first sale. A customer can book a repair, trade in a jacket for store credit or return a new one from the same account, and each route ends at the same grading bench in Vancouver or Montréal. The five condition grades and 64 defect and repair codes we wrote for resale also classify returns, so we can see when a product fails in the same place again and again and tell the design team. In 2025–26 we completed 61,000 repairs, received 52,000 trade-ins and resold 38,000 items. Our online return rate for new clothing fell from 21 per cent in 2021 to 16.5 per cent, largely because fit guidance now draws on return reasons, measured garment dimensions and repair records rather than one size chart.

About 21 per cent of our Canadian online sales come from Québec, and our Montréal repair centre is one of our two largest. Québec's Charter of the French language requires the commercial information we publish there, from product pages to packaging and the website itself, to be available in French at least as readily as in any other language, and amendments passed in 2022 tightened several of those obligations. Our general counsel advises on how they apply. My product rule is practical: French content is written by French-speaking writers in Montréal who sit in the same teams as the English writers, not commissioned once the English is finished. For content that changes item by item, such as resale listings and repair notes, we build the meaning into structured fields, so that each phrase is written once in both languages and reused instead of thousands of unique descriptions being translated.

Our website, app and store tools are released only when they meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA, the standard we have set ourselves, and when disabled testers have completed the core tasks in moderated sessions. Ontario's accessibility standards already require organisations with fifty or more employees in the province, as we have, to make their public websites meet WCAG 2.0 Level AA. I lead six accessibility specialists, but they act as advisers and reviewers rather than a final gate: each product team owns its conformance and carries accessibility criteria in its definition of done. We pay testers from a worker co-operative of disabled people in Vancouver; I serve on its board, a relationship I have disclosed and describe on my Board Readiness page. Our 2024 checkout decision showed the board what the rule costs. Checkout data since then suggests it also improves conversion for customers who use no assistive technology at all.

Personalisation at Sablemere is limited to what a customer could reasonably expect from a good store associate: remembering sizes, suggesting a compatible layer, warning that a boot runs narrow. We show no countdown timers, no stock warnings we cannot verify and no messages that make declining an offer sound foolish. Every recommendation carries a short reason and a control to switch that kind of suggestion off, and Québec's amended privacy law requires us to tell customers when we use technology capable of profiling them and how those functions are activated. Our paid care membership, C$49 a year, follows the same discipline: no pre-selected boxes, a renewal reminder thirty days ahead, online cancellation in two steps and a pro-rated refund on request in the month after renewal. Consumer-protection rules on recurring charges differ from province to province, so we design to the strictest expectation we know of and ask counsel to confirm the detail.