So we all know this morning was a disaster for Bodega. The Bodega drop today was also lower stock than I expected. I’m going to peg it at 2,500 pairs, which is good because it’s better than Packer’s 350 but obviously not amazing stock. I would expect New Balance to have something similar for next week but I don’t have any insight into that.
Really what it came down to today was that Bodega’s site is horrendously made. If you joined me on the webinar or live zoom you saw a handful of times where I would add to cart and the site wouldn’t do it. Or it would remove items from my cart randomly. Something about bodega’s site just does not work well with add to cart. I was concerned by this but didn’t expect it to be THIS bad. Combine that with tens of thousands of visitors and it brought down the entire checkout experience.
Complete failure, we had maybe 40 member orders and it could have easily been 400. They botched this. I guess we should have expected it based on what I saw Wednesday and the fact their previous drops were also bad. Before they didn’t have anti-bot so I thought this may lead to an improvement. Wrong.
On top of that, Bodega could have use the new question and answer feature in bot protection and they didn’t. As you saw today, Union and JJJJound both used it and those release were very much do-able and we saw success. I’m personally disappointed Bodega treated this big brand moment like any other drop and didn’t take some more initiative. For every Union drop, a Bodega doesn’t comes through.
Anyways, on to tomorrow and on to next week. The sneakerhead life cycle continues!