Disappearing Client

A while back now, I took on some work to redesign the ‘new season’ area for an online clothes boutique. It was all very “we need it now”, but at the same time utterly disorganised, and with some truly horrific stuff going on behind the scenes, which made it remarkably difficult to “just slot in” the new season’s items, even without the necessary redesign too.

About five or six weeks later, having worked fairly hard on it – although not having done the (to me) necessary additional work of putting the entire thing into a database-driven system- and having got everything in place (design, new products, blah blah) I contacted the client, and said I was ready to go.

“Oh,” he said “You were taking so long, I ended up getting the design done by someone else. Now they need to ‘just slot in’ the new products.” Fair enough, I thought – I’ve done some work on it, but it’s not the end of the world, so I actually didn’t charge for the work I’d done. Equally, I didn’t send the stuff I’d done through to the end client. It’s ended up relinquishing on my hard drive, and nowhere else.

That was two months ago.

Amusingly (to me, anyway) that client’s new ’boutique’ is still not there. In fact, it now doesn’t even have the holding page, it’s just a “403: Forbidden”. He hasn’t been in touch with me, and that’s his decision.

From my side, OK, I could’ve charged for the work I’ve done. But at the same time, I don’t feel like I’ve lost anything either. If I’d shown them a demo, and they’d plundered it for their own needs, I’d be pissed off, and would’ve charged them. But when all’s said and done, I’ve lost nothing except maybe some work time, when I wasn’t doing much else anyway.

The client, though, has now lost four months of sales, and the stock they bought in will shortly be ‘last season’. Because he was in such a huge hurry that a month took too long, he’s lost far more than he would’ve spent on what I did.

Funny how things work out, isn’t it?