No decision exists in isolation
2026, May 18
No decision exists in isolation
Design doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
A design decision never exists in isolation. It creates new work, introduces new constraints, and influences the choices everyone else has to make. Your work becomes someone else's starting point.
We'd just presented our fall collection in the showroom when a new creative director joined the team. She decided to change the buttons across every style in our denim assortment.
It might not seem like a big change. In practice, it meant unwinding work that had already been handed off. I scheduled an immediate meeting with our product developer to confirm we had enough of the new trims in stock and that our suppliers could actually deliver it. I went into our PLM system and updated the trims for all 150 styles by hand to send to our technical designer. I briefed our technical designer so he could send corrected techpacks to our manufacturer.
One decision made in an afternoon touched trim sourcing, technical documentation, manufacturing communication, and every style in the line.
At the time, I read it as bad timing. But timing wasn't really the issue. Decisions can get reopened by things outside the original process, no matter how sound that process was.
What I can control is how early I catch it. Now, when new creative leadership joins, I walk them through what's already locked before anything moves into production. So, if something's going to change, it happens before 150 techpacks go to a manufacturer, not after.
Protecting the product