Ray Hua has a habit that would make most growth marketers uncomfortable, and that is that he celebrates losing.
As director of D2C and lifecycle marketing at Vessi, the Canadian waterproof footwear brand that found a mass audience during the pandemic, Hua runs three to four experiments every month on the company’s website. A significant portion of them produce no meaningful result. Some actively confirm that a promising idea was wrong. And when that happens, Hua calls it a win.
“The end of the day,” he said, “it’s really important to understand what we learn from it.”
That disposition, methodical, unsentimental, and deeply skeptical of instinct, has quietly become the engine behind one of the more interesting direct-to-consumer operations in footwear. While much of ecommerce in 2026 is still chasing novelty, Vessi is doing something more unfashionable: slowing down to think.
Hunting for Friction
Hua doesn’t think of himself as a conversion rate specialist. He thinks of himself as a friction hunter.
His team monitors on-site drop-offs daily, cross-referencing hard funnel data with qualitative feedback from customers who abandon checkout. The goal isn’t to find a winning headline or a better button color. It’s to build what Hua calls a “knowledge base,” an institutional record of what actually creates resistance for real shoppers, so that engineering hours aren’t wasted chasing someone’s pet theory.
“We don’t create work based on assumptions,” Hua said. “Let’s work on things that we identified as frictions from data points.”
It sounds straightforward. In practice, it requires real organizational discipline, particularly the discipline to shelve good ideas that the data doesn’t support.
The BOPIS Lesson
The clearest example of that discipline came when Vessi examined the question of physical retail.
Before joining Vessi, Hua spent years at Staples Canada, where Buy Online, Pick Up In Store, the retail model known as BOPIS, accounted for 30 to 50 percent of revenue during the pandemic peak. He understood the model’s potential intimately.
But when Vessi tested it, the data was quiet in a way that told its own story. Only a tiny fraction of visitors used on-site search to locate products at nearby stores. Physical foot traffic at Vessi’s handful of retail locations didn’t come close to justifying the operational complexity.
And critically, Vessi’s stores aren’t built like Staples. They don’t have the back-end infrastructure to fulfill online orders on-site. The company routes its ecommerce fulfillment through third-party logistics centers.
Offering BOPIS under those conditions wouldn’t have been an upgrade. It would have been a liability.
“I don’t really like creating an experience just to test,” Hua admitted.
The team killed the idea. For Hua, that was the correct outcome. Operational efficiency, he’s concluded, isn’t just a supply chain concern. It’s a conversion metric. If the infrastructure can’t support a feature seamlessly, the feature creates friction instead of removing it, and friction is precisely what Vessi is trying to eliminate.
Shortening the Window
The pressures of 2025 and early 2026 have given Hua’s methodology its most demanding test yet.
U.S. tariffs have compressed margins across the footwear industry. The removal of the de minimis exemption, the trade rule that previously allowed low-value imports to enter duty-free, has made price sensitivity a more acute concern for brands with international supply chains. Vessi, like many in the space, has had to recalibrate its promotional math.
Rather than investing in new technology to offset the pressure, Vessi leaned into simplicity. The team adopted free AI tools, including Shopify’s Sidekick assistant, to accelerate reporting and reduce analytical overhead. The goal was to do more rigorous work with less friction, not to layer on more complexity.
The most revealing decision came during the holiday season. Vessi had historically run a sprawling, monthlong Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotional window. In 2025, Hua’s team cut it roughly in half, condensing the sale to two weeks.
The result, Hua described, was a meaningful step forward in growth.
The logic, in retrospect, is almost obvious. Black Friday and Cyber Monday represent the single largest window for acquiring first-time Vessi customers. A month-long promotion trains those shoppers to wait, to browse, to think it over. A two-week window removes that option. Either you’re in, or you’ve missed it.
Urgency, it turns out, is a conversion strategy. So is restraint.
The Bigger Picture
Vessi is not a startup anymore. More than half of its sales still flow directly through its own website, which is a meaningful achievement in an era of rising customer acquisition costs and platform dependency. But the company isn’t operating with startup logic either.
What Hua has built is closer to a scientific practice than a marketing operation: hypothesis, test, analyze, document, repeat. The wins matter. The losses matter more. And the discipline to shut down a promising experiment when the data doesn’t support it, whether it’s BOPIS or a month-long sale, is what separates a company that learns from one that just spends.
In a category full of brands adding features, Vessi has found an edge in knowing exactly what to remove.
