Tily Blooms sells fertility and home insemination kits. Returning customers matter enormously to a business like that, and returning customers need to get into their accounts.
They could not. Anyone who forgot their password was stuck outside permanently, and the reason it went unreported for so long is the most useful part of this story.
The reported problem was that password reset emails were not working. That points you at email deliverability: spam folders, sending domains, the email platform.
The emails were arriving. They were fine.
What happened was that clicking the link in the email took you to the account page, and the account page showed you a login form. No box to type a new password into. No error. Just the same login screen you could not get past, which is why you asked for a reset in the first place.
To the customer, the email looked broken. To anyone testing the email, the email looked fine. Both were true, and that gap is why it survived.
The store’s account page had been rebuilt in a page builder to match the brand, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to want.
The default account page is not one screen. It is a set of states: log in, register, lost password, and set a new password. The rebuilt version reproduced the states people see every day and silently dropped the one almost nobody sees.
Every test anyone ran passed. Logging in worked. Registering worked. Requesting a reset worked, and the email arrived. The single step that failed was the one you only reach after all the others, and only when you have already forgotten something.
This is the part I would want a founder to take away.
People buying fertility products do not phone up to complain that they cannot log in. The purchase is private. Getting in touch means explaining who you are and what you were buying, to a stranger, about something you may not have told your own family.
So they did not get in touch. They gave up, and some of them bought somewhere else.
Your support inbox is not a measure of how well your site works, any more than a traffic number tells you the marketing is working. It is a measure of how motivated your customers are to tell you when it does not. In a private, sensitive or high-embarrassment category, that motivation is close to zero, and your inbox will stay quiet while you lose people.
Deployed in July 2026, in three parts.
The customer now clicks the link, sets a password, and is logged in. Which is what they thought would happen the first time.
If any part of your account, checkout or booking flow has been rebuilt to match your brand, walk the unhappy paths yourself. Not the path you demo to people.
Each of those takes two minutes. They are the routes customers take on their worst day on your site, they are a common reason visitors never turn into enquiries, they are the least tested part of almost every business I look at, and they are where quiet revenue goes.
Most founder-led businesses are not short of marketing activity. They are short of a decision about what matters. The Founder-Led Marketing Scorecard takes about three minutes and tells you which of seven areas is holding the rest back.
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