Fifteen years ago the Instant Yoga program at Victoria’s Secret PINK kicked off. At the time, I knew that we were building a retail speed-to-market model, but I didn’t realize how rare it would become.

From the time we said “go,” we could have a pair of foldover yoga pants in stores in nine days. Produced in Sri Lanka. Order to in-store in nine days.

It’s wild to think about now. I haven’t seen anything like it since.

Back then, we talked about speed constantly. The idea was simple: the closer you are to the customer moment, the more right you’ll be. Meaning, the longer you could wait to make a decision and the more in-season insight you could use, the more likely you were to hit the trend when it was actually trending. Higher sell-through. Lower markdowns. Every merchant’s greatest expense avoided.

Since I’ve started consulting, I’ve been surprised how little we talk about speed models. In many organizations, we’re not chasing speed anymore. In some cases, we’re moving in the opposite direction.

So how did we get slower?

After several conversations with past colleagues, five themes kept coming up.

1. Education

Merchants used to own both product and financial impact. At L Brands, we truly did both. The financial side is easier to teach. You learn math in school. Plan vs. budget. Supply and demand. Those fundamentals haven’t changed.

The product side is very different.

If you haven’t spent time in factories, negotiated costs, or understood how materials are sourced, it’s hard to know what to push on:

  • What steps can be eliminated?
  • What’s worth the time and cost?
  • What lever can be pulled?

As teams become more siloed and digital, merchants have less proximity to how product actually gets made. And if you don’t know how it’s made, it’s hard to make it faster.

2. Trust

Speed requires trust. A LOT of it.

It’s an assembly line of decisions. You pass the ball to Sourcing, Planning, Logistics … and trust they’ll keep it moving. Remote work changed how teams operate. The pandemic shook the global supply chain. Borders closed. Materials got stuck. Teams shrank. There was a real sense of panic for a while and the focus became survival.

That mindset still lingers. It makes people more cautious. More protective. Less willing to experiment with models that feel risky.

Caution slows things down.

3. Cost

Let’s be honest: speed models are expensive.

For that nine-day program, we aired everything — materials to factory, finished goods to port and then to the distribution center, product to stores. We carried stock in yarn, fabric and materials.

Cash flow matters, especially in public companies. Speed doesn’t look pretty on paper, but it offsets something significant: markdowns. That was always the tradeoff. Spend more early to protect margin later.

Today, many organizations have become short-sided and have lost the vision for the long-term impact.

4. Egos

A leader once told me, “The whole point of leadership is to hire smart people and then listen to them.”

In tough environments, fear creeps in. And with fear comes control. More approvals. Layers added over time. And eventually, endless sign-offs.

Oversight should serve as quality control and development for the team. But when it becomes about protecting your own role or needing your fingerprints on every decision, speed disappears.

5. Priorities

We’re obsessed with speed when it comes to data and artificial intelligence. Faster insights. Faster dashboards. Faster automation. However, we’re not applying that same urgency to getting product to market. Or better yet, shouldn’t those speedy tools be helping us move even faster than we did 15 years ago?

Instead, speed just doesn’t feel like the priority it once was.

There are too many initiatives. So many shiny objects that promise transformation. But merchandising, at its core, hasn’t changed: Understand your customer. Give them what they want when they want it.

So I keep coming back to the question: What does speed look like today?

Maybe it’s not nine days anymore. Maybe it can’t be.

But have we accepted “slow” as the default without questioning it?

The customer hasn’t slowed down. Why should we?

A Thread Perspective

If I’m being honest, I’d build a speed model like that again in a heartbeat.

Not because it’s flashy or makes for a good story, but because I’ve seen what it does to a business — both financially and culturally.

When we looked back on that nine-day model, the biggest insight surprised people: the blockers weren’t the factory. They weren’t the vendor. They weren’t logistics.

It was us. The cross-functional team.

The moments where ego could have crept in, where approvals could have slowed us down, where trust could have been broken. Those were the real blockers.

Our supply chain could move. Our partners were capable. We just had to align.

That’s still where organizations get tripped up today. It’s rarely just lead times. Decision rights get muddy. Education gaps widen. Layers get added. Fear shows up dressed as oversight.

Speed doesn’t start in the supply chain. It starts in the operating model, and in the room where decisions are made.

At Thread, this is the work we love: redesigning processes, clarifying roles, rebuilding trust, reconnecting merchants to product, and helping leaders decide where speed actually matters.

Because speed for the sake of speed is chaos. But thoughtful, aligned speed? That’s a competitive advantage.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn and has been republished with the author’s permission. 

A former merchant, Anna Kenney is the co-founder and managing partner of Thread Advisory Group.