Happier customers, healthier business

A cross-functional approach to one of fashion’s most expensive habits

When was the last time you returned something bought online?

Background

Fashion retail has a returns problem that’s only getting harder to ignore. Online shoppers do something in-store customers never could: order three sizes, keep the one that fits, send the rest back, a habit the industry calls bracketing. Multiply that across an industry, and the bill comes due twice. Once in dollars, processing a single return can erase up to half its profit margin. And once in carbon, millions of garments are tried on, sent back, and burned or buried every year, simply because the size guess didn’t land.

1×higher apparel returns online than in storeIndustry benchmark · 2024
20%of the purchase price just to process a return — up to 50% of its marginOptoro · 2024 Returns Unwrapped · Nov 2024
56%of unsaleable UK returns hit landfill — 23M items, 750K tonnes CO₂ a yearBritish Fashion Council / DHL / Roland Berger · Solving Fashion’s Product Returns · Mar 2023

Role & Responsibility

Client: Net-A-Porter

Sector: Luxury Fashion E-commerce

Duration: 6–12 months

Role: Service Design Lead

My Mandate

The brief from the CFO was direct: reduce return rates by 40% within the coming quarter.

My mandate was to give the business a holistic view of returns, surfacing where the real opportunity lived, across both business and design, end to end, and to build the programme that would let teams actually own and act on it.

Unpack the challenge

The problem beneath the brief

The CFO’s target was clear. What wasn’t clear was where to start, because the business had never agreed on what the problem actually was. That disagreement was the real challenge. Not the returns themselves, but an organisation that couldn’t act on a problem it hadn’t defined together. That’s what I was actually there to solve.

RiskFraud & abuse

Risk

“We sell luxury. Fraudsters know our return windows better than our own staff do.”

LegalCompliance

Legal

“Fourteen days in Germany, thirty in France. One policy does not cover all markets.”

CRMRetention

CRM

“We have no agreed definition of a high-returner. Everyone is working off a different number.”

Customer ServiceExperience

Customer Service

“Our highest-return customers are also our most loyal. We can’t say no to the VIPs.”

WarehouseOperations

Warehouse

“We cannot issue a refund before inspection. Quality checks take real time and that is not going to change.”

Merch & BuyingProduct signal

Merch & Buying

“Returns are telling us something. We just haven’t been listening.”

Hover any card to bring it forward

Pre-Purchase ExperienceHelp customers make the right purchase, first time

Post-Purchase ExperienceTurn the return moment into a retention opportunity

Data & Operation EcosystemThe accuracy and efficiency layer everything else builds on

Full returns landscape map — the complete journey in one view

30+ Business activities

Consolidate all the ongoing and planning initiatives tackling returns.

Scalable solutions

Workstream 01

Redesigning the return signal

“Just unsuitable.” Technically, a reason; practically, useless. So we rebuilt the moment itself: design a return flow that collects genuinely useful data, not just what customers were willing to say, but what the business actually needed to know. We redesigned the flow, validated the language, and introduced mindful friction, improving data quality without damaging the experience.

Key insight £300M of orders a year came back with a reason that told us nothing

Reference — PDPs

The Stack — 12 Modules

Conversion Core 01–07

Nav

Gallery

Overview

Detail

Colour Selector

Size Selector

Actions

Trust & Detail 08–10

Message

Additional Detail

Service

Discovery 11–12

Upsell

Cross-sell

Workstream 02

Helping customers buy right the first time

I guided the team to understand the mental models behind purchase decisions: how curiosity, consideration, and confidence shift by category. We mapped those needs to a modular, category-adaptable PDP architecture tied to commercial KPIs, giving teams a system built for the best-informed purchase decision.

Key insight A £3,000 engagement ring and a £15 eyeshadow, on the same static PDP.

Size and fit data-flow map across teams and tooling

Workstream 03

Fix the data at the root

I unpacked how that data actually moved, then redesigned the workflow so accuracy got built in upstream rather than fixed downstream, pairing the new process with AI-driven size recommendations and action cards that clarified ownership and sequencing across the 10+ teams who touched it.

Key insight 50+ data points behind a single pair of trainers, entered manually across different teams.

Impact

Pilot phase7%

Return reduction

The programme’s contribution to returns, measured during the 12-week pilot phase.

6×Conversion uplift, with smart size-tool engagement

64%Reduction in manual data correction

Improvement in data utilisation40%

Functions trained and prepared for migration10+

Afterthoughts

The warehouse taught me more than any workshop.

We didn’t just guess what the team needed; we shadowed quality checks in the warehouse and handled high-stakes VIP returns in customer service. By jumping into their daily grind and respecting their learning curves, we stopped designing for them and started co-creating with teams and functions as fellow experts. That’s how you turn tech anxiety into genuine team synergy.

Tech can’t rescue a process nobody understands

Before touching a single model, we had to trace exactly how data moved through the business: who entered it, where it broke down, and why the workarounds existed. Introducing AI was the easier problem. Getting 10+ teams to agree on how a size should be recorded and surfaced was the design challenge worth solving.