The mistakes and lessons learned from yesterday’s H&M Erdem collab drop

Introduction

I had no idea this was happening until one of my Slack people mentioned that there was going to be an H&M Erdem collaboration drop on 11/2.  I love these reselling opportunities – limited release items.  You guys remember the Target Lily Pulitzer collab a few years ago that made the news.  Anyway, I had never heard of Erdem before yesterday (#oldman,) but I was looking through their stuff and thought it’d be a good opportunity to resell.  Let me pause now to address all you haters who just muttered, “UGH!  That shit’s hideous!”  Yes, I realize having flowers on clothes scare some of you, but you need to realize that there’s another world out there past solid colors and stripes.  The flowers won’t hurt you.  Maybe they’ll even make you look purtier.

Okay, I somewhat lied in the last paragraph.  I actually wanted some of the items myself.  For the past month, I seem to be going through a mid-life crisis where I want to be young and hip.  I hope this phase passes quickly because it’s eating into my profits.  It’s like a drug dealer smoking his own crack.  Never use your own product.  So I was eyeing the 2 hooded sweatshirts for myself.  Only problem – I wasn’t going to wait in line and so I had to wake up at 5AM PST to buy this stuff before the resellers get everything. Damn you resellers!

 

Preparing to buy

I had never bought anything from hm.com before today, and so I created an account and profile.  I couldn’t save a credit card until I placed an order, so I made an order and cancelled the items immediately to save my ATT card to my profile.  I even saved my account into into my Lastpass account.  In my head I was locked and loaded.  Just wake up and buy, right?  WRONG!

 

Use the app

I woke up at 5AM and sure enough, the site had a waiting page.  This was on a laptop and the mobile site.  I then turned to Twitter and people were saying to use the app.  DOUGH!  You’d think I would have learned this lesson with the iPhones, but clearly I didn’t.  I figured they didn’t have a mobile site that worked like terrible Gamestop.

 

Itchy trigger finger

My laptop got in at about 5:08AM or so.  I was so shocked that I was in and everything seemed to be in stock.  I was then fast and furiously trying to buy my 2 hoodies.  I also bought the backpack since it looked cool and maybe I could flip it.  In hindsight, I should have added everything.  I was so worried that things would go out of stock if I took too long adding too many things to my cart.  I was so paranoid to go as fast as possible that I didn’t even think to type in the free shipping code worth $6.

 

Lastpass not working

With those 3 things in cart, I was ready to check out with my saved credentials.  Problem – my laptop’s Lastpass didn’t seem to synch the hm.com credentials from my desktop.  FFFFFFFFFFFMYLIFE.  I then had to type in my username and manually type in one of those hard 12 character passwords with caps, numbers, and symbols.  I pushed SUBMIT.  WRONG PASSWORD!  I mean, of course.  When it rains, it pours.  I then did guest checkout and was able to checkout.  SUCCESS!  This was at 05:12AM.

 

Round two

With one order down, I figured I’ll go for round 2 and buy my wife some items.  I was adding dresses to the cart, but wasn’t sure her size so I nudged her awake to confirm her size.  I then added more random stuff for myself.  My cart was up to 14 items!  When I went to check out, 9 of them were OOS.  ARRRGHHH.  It crossed my mind to ship to my PO BOX, but I knew the limits were 1 per item and I hadn’t exceeded that limit, so went ahead and did guest checkout to my house as well.  This time on checkout, I couldn’t paste my card number into the box.  I then couldn’t switch to Lastpass to read the numbers and so I resorted to pasting the card number into the Notes app and eventually was able to check out.  SUCCESS!  This was at 05:18AM.

 

Lessons Learned

First one – always try the mobile app.  Second – make sure your Lastpass is in synch.  Third – Buy first, think later.  If I didn’t like anything, I could have just returned them back to the store.  I didn’t consider that until it was already too late.  I still think I did the right thing to check out my first order ASAP.  If my credentials had worked, I could have gone back a 2nd time to add all of my wife’s things.  On some sites, if you try to check out with 14 items in your cart, it may kick you back when you submit the order.  Then you have to go back to cart and remove the OOS item and try again.  This could be a neverending process.  So I think I made the right move to do 2 orders.

On the bright side, at least I saved a $1,000 by not buying anything for my wife?  I don’t plan on keeping most of the stuff, so I’ll let you guys know how I did reselling the items in a few weeks.