The shop that never failed

On a main road in Doha there was, for decades, a department store everybody knew. It sold the same things in the same layout to the same families, and it almost never made a visible mistake. Nothing was tried that might not work. Nothing new was launched that might have to be withdrawn.

A few streets away, a young couple sell homeware online. In a typical month they try four or five things. A new range, a different way of photographing it, a bundle, a delivery offer, a product nobody else in the city is carrying. Most of these do not work. They drop them quickly, without ceremony, and try the next.

From the outside, the department store looks like the success and the couple look like the ones still finding their feet. Their record is full of things that were started and stopped.

That record is the point. Each failure is cheap, quick and informative. Over a year, the few things that do work add up to a business that knows its customers better than anyone, and that a newcomer cannot easily copy, because the newcomer has not paid for all the lessons.

The store did the opposite. It protected itself from small failures for so long that it lost the habit of trying. When the shoppers moved, it had nothing ready, because nothing had been tested for years.

We tend to admire the business that never seems to put a foot wrong. It is usually more useful to look at the one that puts a foot wrong every few weeks and survives every time.

Failing often, in small ways, is not the price of becoming hard to beat. It is how it is done.