FORLIFE VERSION 2.0

As you may have noticed, we’ve been going through a period of transition here at forlife for the past few months. It’s been a challenging time at times, but it’s forced us to draw on our resources to find solutions and reinvent ourselves. We’ve always kept one goal in mind: to offer you the best possible experience and remain true to our values.

As our team discussions progressed, it became quite clear that we wanted to completely rethink our pre-order model. We’d like to share with you, in a spirit of full transparency, our analysis and the solutions we’re proposing to evolve our model—in what we believe is the right direction:

OUR FINDING: The Limitations of Pre-orders

Based on more than three years of experience with pre-orders and your feedback, we’ve identified several major issues with our current model:

1. The Wait
It’s a bit of a contradiction because, as you know, waiting is part of the pre-order process! But it’s one of the things that comes up most often in our surveys: you’d like the wait to be shorter. Three months is the average wait time for a pre-order with us. And unfortunately, this wait time can’t be shortened—at least not with our current pre-order system.

2. Seasonality
Another issue intrinsically linked to the first—wait times—is seasonality: to receive your summer item, you have to place a preorder in the middle of winter. But it’s hard for you to picture yourself in a swimsuit in the middle of February, just as it’s hard to imagine receiving your item at the end of summer. Once again, with our current lead times, we’re kind of stuck. It’s a bit of a vicious cycle!

3. Production Uncertainties
On top of that, there are sometimes production delays: fortunately, this isn’t always the case, but even when we build in a buffer, additional delays can still occur, because, unfortunately, production isn’t an exact science. It’s a bit like when you’re doing home renovations—things don’t always go as planned ;)
Nevertheless, these situations are just as difficult for us as they are for you: you’ve already been waiting long enough, and we know how frustrating it can be to receive an item when the season is already well underway.

→ Even though the concept of pre-ordering is sound in many ways, it’s clear that, in its current form , it poses real limitations that prevent the experience from being the best it could be for you.

OUR SOLUTION: From Pre-Order to Reservation

Always striving to satisfy you, we’d like to evolve this concept—but without compromising our core principles and values, which are to produce a collection of high-quality basics using the most sustainable methods possible. We’d therefore like to offer you a different way to place a pre-order: the reservation.

Pre-orders
Pre-orders allow us to offer you our items at pre-order prices, delivered in just one month! To make this possible , we commit to ordering the minimum production quantities required by our factories for certain items well in advance, and to offering them for pre-order once manufacturing is already well underway—one month before final delivery to your doorstep.

The benefits of early booking, without the drawbacks!
This allows us to resolve most of the issues mentioned above:
- shorter wait times for you, and a clearer picture of what the season will look like
- better control over timing, since we open pre-orders one month before the delivery date—by which time our factories can provide us with a more reliable lead time.
- Production remains as lean as possible, since we’re committed to producing only the minimum required—which is already the case for the majority of our pre-orders right now

Of course, this means we have to make advance forecasts by size and color, and that can lead to stockouts: it’s a risk we’re willing to take!

In practical terms, how will it work?

A New Launch Schedule
With this new approach to pre-orders, we aim to adopt a new launch schedule—one that we believe is more sustainable. Currently, we launch a new product every week, which we find both repetitive and too aggressive in terms of marketing.

When you sign up, we’ll offer you one monthly launch of a “mini-collection” of products centered around a specific theme. This will help put the products into context and provide more style inspiration.

IMPLEMENTATION: When will it take effect?

We'd like to take advantage of the start of the school year and the sense of renewal it brings to test this new approach starting at the end of September!

We hope you’ll join us in this new phase of the forlife adventure! Here, nothing is ever set in stone—we’re flexible, and that’s the advantage of small teams! So if you have any comments, we’re all ears, and we always take your feedback very seriously ;)

Have a great week, everyone!

The forlife team