Curious in the quiet months

A woman in Dubai sells table runners and serving trays online from a rented storeroom. Once a year come the weeks that make or break her: the rush in the run-up to Ramadan, when orders arrive faster than she can tape boxes shut.

This year, in the middle of the rush, she has ideas. A new colour that a few customers asked about. A gift-wrap option. A bundle with a matching set of napkins. Each one sounds clever. She adds all three.

By the weekend, orders are mixed up, the wrapping paper has run out, the courier is waiting on parcels that are not ready, and the returns have begun. None of the ideas was bad. The timing was.

Speed comes from narrowing things down. When she knows exactly what is being sold, in which sizes, packed which way, every hour does more and fewer things go wrong. The fewer open questions, the faster the work moves.

Discovery works the other way. It means trying things that might not land, asking customers what they wish existed, accepting that some of it will fail. It is valuable, and it is slow and messy by nature. It needs room to fail cheaply.

Pour discovery into the busiest weeks and it stops being cheap. Every experiment now costs late parcels, unhappy customers and her own sleep.

The answer is not to stop having ideas. It is to have them in the quiet months, when a new colour can be tested on twenty orders and a bad bundle costs almost nothing. By the time the rush arrives, the experimenting should already be done.

She needs speed and she needs curiosity. Just never in the same season.