How Passenger went from scattered spreadsheets to an operational platform that runs the whole business
Joe Simms joined Passenger Clothing as Head of Technology in early 2023 with a precise idea of what needed building. He'd spent the better part of two decades thinking about how product brands should manage their operational data. What he found when he arrived made the scale of the challenge obvious.
Passenger are an outdoor and lifestyle apparel brand that had grown to around £30m in revenue by 2023. 400+ active styles, DTC and B2B, selling across the UK and into international markets, with warehouses on both sides of the Atlantic and wholesale accounts growing into the US. The operational complexity was real and getting more complex by the season. The infrastructure for managing it wasn't keeping up.
Product data lived in Shopify. Costing and buying data lived in Google Sheets. Inventory and fulfilment ran through Brightpearl. Product design and development lived in Backbone, their PLM. Nothing talked to anything else.
What Joe found when he looked closer was messier than even that. "There are so many spreadsheets I don't even know about still," he said. "People are copying and pasting everything between spreadsheets." The seasonal range plan, the document that organised every season's buying, had become the business's centre of gravity. Teams lived in it because they'd always lived in it. It held buying data, cost data, supplier information, and product details: all pulled by hand from the systems that were supposed to hold them.
This is what we call the Dark Stack: not a single broken system, but a pattern. Tools accumulated to solve specific problems at specific moments, each one siloed, each one depending on a person to copy, translate, and reconcile data across all the others. When a factory changed a specification across the product range, that meant propagating the change manually across Shopify, Brightpearl, and whichever version of the spreadsheet was current. When the buying team needed a range view for a new season, they built it in Google Sheets - pulling data out of Airtable to do it.
By mid-2024, even after more than a year of building in Airtable, the pull of the familiar was winning. "When I go to that Google sheet, Olly, everyone's looking at it every day," Joe said. "No one's looking at Airtable. It's really frustrating." New people joined the team, didn't get trained on Airtable, and defaulted to spreadsheets. The data started fracturing again.
Joe had been thinking about this class of problem for a long time. "I've probably spent 20 years thinking about this on and off," he said. "The biggest mistake people make is if they procure or implement software, they just think it's a one off shot. It's not a living and breathing thing. Anything that's operationalised within a business needs constant adaptation and development to evolve."
