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Two public companies, from their own filings and statements: one retired a famous stage when the data showed where its customers had gone, and one built its business on designing the reorder.
Companies rarely publish their journey maps. They do publish the decisions a map leads to. Both cases here are far larger than the brands this guide is written for; what transfers is the method, not the scale.
For most of its life Warby Parker’s best-known stage sat between the first visit and the first order. Its 10-K for fiscal 2024 describes it: customers pick five frames on the site and try them at home “for five full days”, free Filed. Home Try-On answered the hardest question in buying glasses online, whether they’d suit you, by adding a stage to the journey: frames arrive, you try them, you send them back and order.
On August 7, 2025, in its second-quarter earnings release, the company disclosed its decision to sunset the program at the end of the year Filed. Retail Dive reported the reason executives gave on the earnings call: most recent home try-on users lived within 30 minutes of one of its roughly 300 stores Reported. Co-founder and co-CEO Neil Blumenthal called Home Try-On “a novel way to help customers shop for glasses online” Reported. The same 10-K describes the alternatives, a Virtual Try-On tool and an online quiz, and says customers who shop across product lines and channels “tend to convert to highly loyal returning customers” Filed.
Read as a journey decision: a stage designed for customers with no store nearby was now used mostly by customers who had one. Data about who was in the stage, not a workshop, redrew the map. Ask the same of your oldest stages: the sample program, the quiz, the welcome series. Who uses each one now?
Chewy treats the second order as a stage to design, not a hope. Its 10-K describes Autoship as “customizable and convenient automatic reordering” Filed. In its fiscal 2025 results, Chewy reported that sales to Autoship customers reached $10.5 billion, 83.3% of net sales, up from 79.2% the year before, with 21.3 million active customers spending $591 each on average Reported.
The backstage is part of the design. Chewy’s 10-K for the year ended February 1, 2026 says it operates “customer service centers 24/7”, and describes surprising customers “with a hand-painted pet portrait” and offering “personalized expressions of sympathy” when a pet dies Filed. In this book’s terms, those are good endings to detours: a contact that ends with an answer at any hour, and a loss that ends with care rather than a cancellation form.
Copy the two decisions, not the scale: make the reorder a designed stage with its own owner (The Standing Order and The Free Choice cover how), and staff the backstage behind the detours as part of the journey.
Neither decision is a better email. Both change what customers do between two events, both rest on a count of who is actually in the stage, and both needed an owner with the authority to change the backstage. That’s why chapter 10 puts one name on each stage.
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Written by Andrew Lauchner, a growth and retention operator for consumer brands. The paid work is one ninety-day Sprint.
This is one chapter of The Journey Map, which is free and readable in full on a single page with no form in front of it.