Notwithstanding its strategic conception, destinctive design, and favorable market reception, the Belt Bag faced a set of unexpected challenges during its development and early commercialisation. Some within Burberry noted how the elevated positioning of the Belt Bag — along with new raw materials, design features, and vendor relationships — introduced new complexities across Burberry's design, development, and merchandising process — thus creating a learning curve for the organization. Many also pointed to the ways in which lessons from the Belt Bag launch were already being absorbed into the organization and applied to new product cycles.
The primary challenges noted during the development process related to quality issues that arose and were addressed, and also to the difficulty that emerged around matching inventory to sales cycles. "When regions bought their reorders of the ones they’d sold out of very quickly, they placed too heavy an inventory," said Chief Merchandising Officer Judy Collins. "So we went into too many weeks of cover on this bag as it began to slow down, especially in the medium size. So we’ve learned lessons, at the same time as we’ve had successes"
Jalaj Hora emphasized the importance of establishing new systems for governance as practices evolved:
Establishing the governance now that best practices are already in place is critical. To explain that in more detail — typically when you have a problem, you find the solution, you deploy the solution, you have a good product. For instance, the number of bags that we are producing has expanded quite significantly, which means we have multiple production lines on this bag with more than one vendor manufacturing this bag now. Establishing governance to ensure consistency across vendor base and across manufacturing lines is absolutely critical. So we can’t take our eyes off the ball.