Hey there, what's up? Welcome to Side Usal School. My name is Chris Killabau. I believe we can learn as much from failure as we can from success, if not in fact more.

And it is with this principle in mind that we have been publishing Failure Friday, a collection of short stories all about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course failure. Sometimes things go wrong.

Things go wrong quite a lot actually and I feel like we don't talk about it nearly often enough, especially for anybody out there who is struggling to get started and thinking is it supposed to be easy.

Well, it's probably not going to be easy at least not always, but it is usually worth it.

Okay, so just like our throwback Thursday segment, which conveniently comes out on Thursdays, you're going to hear directly from side uslers who have struggled to get something off the ground.

They're going to tell you a short story of something that went very wrong. So I really applaud their courage. I'll share some of my stories along the way as well.

And today's short story features Alex Phillips from Victoria, Australia. Her business is called St. Belford.

Alex and her partner sell these really beautiful lifestyle planners slash wellness diaries. She calls them all in one lifestyle planners that seamlessly blend everyday tasks with self care, mindfulness habits and goals.

We told the successful story of these diaries for business on episode 683. So that's quite a while ago. Alex had the idea that as her business grew, so it was going really well, she would start working directly with her manufacturer in China instead of using a middleman.

It all sounds logical and simple, right? Well, nothing on failure Friday is ever simple. And of course it didn't go according to plan to get that this planner business, you know, it didn't go according to plan.

Okay, I'll stop now. Let's hear from Alex. I'll come back at the end to wrap us up.

My name is Alex and I'm the co-founder of St. Belford. We create lifestyle planners and journals that focus on self care, habits, goals and personal growth.

In our first year of business, we had a middleman here in Australia, handle the entire manufacturing process for us. But we weren't overly satisfied with the result.

So in our second year, we decided to find a new manufacturer in China and deal with them directly. We naively thought we'd have more control over the manufacturing process and be able to reduce the percentage of defective goods.

We clearly outlined our expectations and our definition of a defective product to which they agreed. They even agreed to compensate us if the percentage of defective goods exceeded the agreed rate of 2%.

A sample was made and it ticked all our boxes. There were no red flags that we could spot.

A couple of months later, our stock arrived and this is where the nightmare begins.

We started unpacking the boxes only to find scratches and indents on the front cover which made them unsellable. The divider ribbons were frayed and unevenly cut and that wasn't even the worst of it.

We didn't discover the worst of it until a week later, after sending hundreds of orders.

We received an email from a customer explaining that her diary, her planner, was missing September. And this sparked a lot of confusion because we didn't even think this could be an issue.

We quickly started flipping through planner after planner and bam. Another planner with missing pages. Another planner in the incorrect order.

I felt like the business we had built was crumbling. I was crushed. Thankfully, Tom, the other co-founder, is pretty calm in a crisis. He decided the best thing we could do is to own our mistake.

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